Built Environment

The Instrumentalization of Landscapes in Contemporary Cities

About this issue

Issue number
Volume 44 – Number 3

Summary

To what extent have we commodified landscapes and nature? How has this commodification influenced life in the city, including urban processes? Where do efforts to reclaim space within the city for nature fit in the power dynamics within cities? The papers in this issue present three perspectives on this instrumentalization of landscape and nature in cities: the paradigmatic, the urban and regional, and the local/personal.

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“Landscape is a medium found in all cultures” - W.T.J., Mitchell, 2002

Today, cities are redefining their relationships with the natural world, spurring a new dynamic between the built environment, man-made landscapes, and nature. Nature is no longer seen as the antithesis of the city and civilized life, or as something simply to support urban dwellers’ social life, but also as a means of fighting challenges such as climate change, urban health and well-being within the city. This approach to landscape and nature in cities has evolved as a response to the human–nature crisis and the need to limit urban development in open areas of ecological importance.
 
In terms of planning, this approach called for the preparation of pre-development surveys, including a comprehensive land survey that relates to climate, geology, hydrology, flora and fauna as means to better planing the built environment. In addition, and in parallel, to the discussion on the conservation of land resources outside urban space, there was also recognition of the need to address the natural systems in cities (Scheer, 2011). This recognition led to investigation of flora and fauna in the city and examination of the city’s ecosystems, which in turn led to new design strategies viewing landscape as a key component in creating new hybrid ecosystems (Mossop, 2006). At the beginning of the twenty-first century this ecological emphasis in cities is associated with two prominent concepts: landscape urbanism (Waldheim, 2006) which emerged from architecture and planning, combining design with ecological approaches, and urban ecology (Mostafavi and Doherty, 2016; Steiner, 2011) whose roots are in ecological positivist studies.
 
Viewing landscape and nature as a means/tool that can ‘solve’ some of the major challenges of contemporary urbanization also contributed to their presence in our daily life. Recycling, greening and rehabilitating nature in the city have not been merely theoretical-utopian ideas but rather translated into practice through policy documents, designated campaigns, and legal initiatives. This condition contributed to the centrality of landscape in city life and also, as suggested by W.J.T. Mitchell (2002), contributed to the use of landscape as a verb. As he further argues, landscape is not just an object to be seen, or text to be read, but a process by which social and subjective identities are formed; as such, landscape is not merely signifying power relations; it is an instrument of cultural power, perhaps even an agent of power that is independent of human intentions (Ibid., p. 1). 

Landscape and Nature in Contemporary Cities

The centrality of landscape in cities should be viewed as ideological. Policies, practices and projects that focus on the landscape and nature of city are part of what could be called the ecological turn and the aim of researchers and politicians to ‘protect the globe’. This ecological turn is manifested in two overarching global key concepts that shape contemporary urban development: the sustainable city and the resilient city. The idea of sustainability focuses on the responsibilities and rights of current and future generations, emphasizing the high cost of the developed world’s way of life and humankind’s obligation to act to reduce environmental degradation, particularly the threat of global climate change (Haughton, 1999; Jabareen, 2006). Ultimately, the notion of sustainable development concerns the long-term survival and healthy evolution of the planet (Haughton, 1999). Spatially, the sustainable city is concerned with the transformation and restructuring of major infrastructure (e.g. transportation systems, water use management, waste disposal, energy efficiency, and green construction) and the management of green areas (e.g. parks and gardens). The sustainable city concept also emphasizes issues such as enhanced walkability and accessibility in the city and the preservation of urban ecosystems (Brebbia, 2000; Wheeler and Beatley, 2008) as well as the growth and regeneration of built and populated urban areas (Jenks and Jones, 2010). Thus, the implementation of this approach implies interventions on multiple levels, including neighborhood, municipal and regional levels. Physically, the sustainable approach advocates ideas such as compactness, density, mixed land use, diversity, passive energy design, greening (Burton et al., 2003), and the protection of the city’s natural areas and food-producing capacity.
 
The concept of the resilient city is embedded in the latest defensive concept of the ‘risk society’ and highlights the vulnerability of certain communities to large-scale global challenges, such as climate change, terrorism, and the globalized economy, and stresses that these challenges impact not only global but also (and even more so) local, especially certain underprivileged communities in specific cities (Jabareen, 2013; Pelling, 2003; UN-HABITAT, 2011; Vale, 2014). Spatially, urban planning plays a central role in making cities more resilient by shaping the built environment through land-use management and the prediction and anticipation of risks, uncertainties and ways of coping (Jabareen, 2013; Zhang, 2010). The concept demands addressing threats and helping cities recover from natural disasters or heinous human acts by creating networked social communities and lifeline systems through which it is possible to adapt and rebound to new levels of sustainability (Grove, 2014; Vale and Campanella, 2005; Pelling, 2003). Also this approach can be applied on multiple levels, both as territorial scale and as governance (Godschalk, 2002; Pickett et al., 2004; Vale, 2014). Like the sustainable city concept, the resilient city also promotes smart growth, compactness, and high density as a means to combat urban sprawl (Duany, 2000). Physically, resilient cities are regarded as heterogeneous ecosystems that promote flexibility and adaptability (Pickett et al., 2004). As such, natural and human-made hazards must be considered when developing physical systems and infrastructure such as roads, buildings, and communications facilities (Godschalk, 2002).
 
These concepts have influenced dramatically the manifestation and centrality of landscape in cities. Their emergence have contributed to legislation that encourages greening, to the development of new landscape projects at the urban and regional scale, to the rehabilitation of natural resources, and to the investment in designated infrastructure that supports the preservation of nature. Policy-makers worldwide have been embracing all these tools in greening cities. More than that ‘people have gradually come to believe that gardens are (or have once again become) a symbol of change and powerful lever for community life, tied in with major political, economic and environmental issues’ (Terrin, 2013, p. 12). Greening was thus not merely attached to the survival and healthy evolution of the planet but also to a sense of community, belonging and urban health. Landscape has become a practice and a solution to multiple challenges; it has become the ‘hope’ of future cities. 

Key Factors in Greening Cities

While these paradigm shifts have been established in theory and practice, the public institutions, i.e. municipalities and governments, could not carry them alone but required economic support from the private sector. Such a situation, in which landscape initiatives are subjected to the political economy of the city, results in the loss of much of the idealism (and thus substance) associated with many ecological and social initiatives. To put it differently, the landscape projects and greening policies that have emerged as a fundamental requisite for the contemporary sustainable and resilient city have often become marketing and branding tools that enhance city’s image, attract development, propel the economy forward and cultivate cultural heritage, and in doing so contribute to commodification and modify land values.
 
This bi-directional approach to considering the landscape in cities – i.e. the significant and necessary role of landscape and nature in cities’ development on one hand, and its instrumentalization as branding and economic tools that impact land value and affordability, on the other – is the framework within which most contemporary cities now operate. Without doubt,  this approach, which is influencing both the process of implementation and materiality manifestation, is considered a common feature of the urbanized world (Brenner and Schmid, 2014). In that sense, the multiple tools for greening cities cannot be considered as context-specific but rather as universal, with policies and projects, being imitated and replicated worldwide. 
 
More specifically, three levels are involved in greening cities: governmental institutions, i.e. policies; municipalities, i.e. landscape projects; local/individual, i.e. daily practices.
 
  • Governmental institutions mainly initiate generic policies, with a reference to broader principles stated by international institutions such as the UN, EU, and so on. As such they tend to be a-contextual, supporting initiatives that increase ecological as well economic value of sites. In addition, governmental policies play a significant role in building a consensus around the concept of sustainability and resiliency, so making a city more attractive for citizens and for foreign and local investment. 
  • Municipalities focus on the development of landscape projects, conceived and programmed for a specific site, as well as cities’ developing infrastructure that would support recycling and greening. Though they might be adjusted to a particular city or culture, the development of projects and infrastructure are based on similar rational and design strategies. Especially in the last twenty years, landscape design projects have taken on a kind of homogeneous approach in the quest of balancing urbanization and densification. 
  • Local/individual practices represent an important level in the absorption of the ecological turn. It is the local initiatives and practices of individuals that contribute to the spread of green in contemporary city; individuals and collective subjectivities (e.g. associations, cooperatives, movements) take care of the green in their urban environment, from the scale of the individual urban gardening to the communal public green. Such practices are usually very encouraged by institutions and local governments, because they also work as a means to enhancing a sense of community, belonging and urban health, beyond increasing the landscape materiality of the city.
In exploring further the levels of landscape initiatives, it is important to understand the actual instruments that contribute to the development of landscape and nature in contemporary cities. What are these instruments and what has been achieved by them? To what extent have we commodified landscapes and nature? How has this commodification influenced life in the city, including urban processes? Where do efforts to reclaim space within the city for nature fit in the power dynamics within cities?

The Instrumentalization of Landscape: The Paradigmatic, the Urban, and the Personal Levels

The papers in this issue present three perspectives on the instrumentalization of landscape and nature in cities: the paradigmatic, the urban and regional, and the local/personal. Each perspective is addressed both from a discursive analysis and from an empirical-contextual point of view, offering diverse viewpoints on the contribution and realization of these instruments. 
 
  1. The Paradigmatic Perspective focuses on the ideology of greening the city. Federico Ferrari’s paper, Reactionary Landscape: the Discourse of Naturalism as a Grand Narrative, argues that we live in the era that is marked by the presence of the term landscape in all discourses and disciplines. The most hegemonic ideas and representations are those associated with nature and whose tools are often marketing strategies of ‘greenwashing’ including rooftop gardens, vertical forests, plant walls. By deepening the ideology behind that and focusing on some processes, Ferrari interrogates the cultural meaning of this phenomenon.

    ​Addressing this grand narrative of landscape and nature in the city, with a focus on materiality and design, Tali Hatuka explores contemporary trends in landscape design. In her paper, The Generic Design of Urban Parks, she presents some of the dominant design features in the development of urban landscape. Addressing varied examples, she argues that the design of open spaces in the city is based on a pragmatic approach that further contributes to the consumption of public spaces. The paper ends with a discussion of alternative approaches and the role of complex, dynamic public spaces in our cities.

  2. The Urban and Regional Perspective focuses on the way landscape projects are changing and modifying life in cities and regions. The first more conceptual paper, Branded Landscapes vs Reform of Ordinary Landscapes: An Insight from Italy, by Arturo Lanzani and Cristiana Mattioli focuses on the way landscapes have become a central component in the economic improvement and in the valorization of heritage, as well as in planning strategies. The key argument is that landscape heritage sites have become a branding tool for cultural economy. This dynamic may be seen in the context of cultural heritage policies that aim to preserve heritage from aggression and destruction, but at the same time are responsible for a new process of stereotyping and ‘showcasing’ protected heritage sites. The paper ends by proposing strategies to overcome the threats of ill-conceived and misdirected, glossy, and/or overbearing initiatives, policies and projects related to natural and designed landscape sites and projects.
    ​Complementing these ideas, Cristina Mattiucci, in her paper, Landscape as a Founding Element of the Contemporary Urban, discusses how landscape transformations redefine the features of territories in collective imaginaries, making the landscape emerge as a strategic element in planning policies. The paper investigates an artificial basin landscape project, tracking the changes in the perception of the area by those who permanently and temporarily inhabit it. Mattiucci argues that understanding the cultural, economic, and political meanings of the landscape strongly influences territorial marketing strategies and individual living choices. In her conclusions she suggests that interpretation of the landscape in the contemporary city must go beyond addressing forms and functions, and address the cultural and political perspectives that contribute to its transformation. 
  3. The Personal and Local level refers to initiatives and practices associated with greening cities. Addressing the phenomenon of community gardens and the discourse evolved around it, One Landscape Multiple Meanings: Revisiting Contemporary Discourses on Urban Community Gardens, by Efrat Eizenberg, maps the different ways in which scholars conceptualize the formation of, and care for, urban community gardens. It shows how these gardens are perceived both as spaces with the potential to cultivate new ideas about cooperative relations and sustainable urbanism, and as a form of a neoliberal ‘greenwashing’ development strategy. Eizenberg’s perspective takes into account the broad, and sometimes conflicting, interpretations of community gardens and offers a complex reading of what kind of landscape is produced by them.
    Greening not only affects community perceptions but also the way individuals envisage their living space and conduct their day-to-day activities. Lise Bourdeau-Lepage in her paper Nature and Well-Being in the French City: Desire and Homo Qualitus, argues that individuals have become aware of the essential role played by nature, in particular in terms of their well-being. They have rediscovered the benefits of nature and seek to make the most of it. Exploring the practices of individuals in the French society, she shows how people, policy-makers and economic actors are developing an ecological conscience, and how plants and vegetation are occupying an ever more important place in cities. In her conclusion she underlines the way in which the desire for nature and the willingness to preserve the environment exposed the environment itself to a real risk of the instrumentalization of nature.
    Linking both the level of the community and the individual, the last paper in the issue by Alessia de Biase, Carolina Mudan Marelli, and Ornella Zaza reminds us that we must view contemporary landscape ideas and practices in a historical perspective. In their paper, From Collective Urban Gardens to Individual Micro-Landscapes, they show that the politicization of urban nature is unavoidable. By exploring the evolution and the cultivation of landscape in the city of Paris, they explain the shift that has taken place in the public policy approach with regard to urban nature. As they argue, the individual (citizen) is becoming a dominant actor in the management of nature in the city, a role that is further enhanced by the use of digital platforms and applications that support it.

From the Fragmented to Systematic: Future Landscape Interventions in Cities 

The centrality of nature and landscape in the city, as the papers in the issue show, is an ideological construction. Yet, this ideology is not new, but rather it is evolutionary. What characterizes contemporary ideas and instruments is that they are embedded in the neoliberal economy with all its associated disadvantages. To be sure, contemporary cities rely on the market and private-sector participation in greening the city, and certainly these initiatives contribute to urban health, to the development of an ecological consciousness, and to well-being. Yet, greening does not benefit all inhabitants of the city and the question of the accessibility to these emerging landscapes and places is questionable. Furthermore, beyond the question of accessibility and justice, there is also the issue of culture and context, and the fact that greening instruments do not always fit all communities, places, and cities. In short, greening and beautifying cities comes with a ‘price-tag’. The critical questions are: What now? Where do we go from here? 
 
As a first step it is suggested to be conscious that these different instruments are all part of an eclectic toolbox used and supported by governmental institutions, operating under the framework of neoliberal economy. As a second step it would be valuable to go beyond focusing on specific instruments and to develop a holistic and dynamic city strategic landscape plan that takes into account not just space but also time. This type of strategic plan is not just a programmatic tool, but should be viewed as an ongoing adaptive framework that takes into account spatial and societal changes. Finally, the synthetic approach to landscape planning will assist both planners and theorists in viewing the city and the region as a whole and assessing the links between ideas and materiality, and their influence on people. Such a synthetic approach will also help cities determine what has been done and what needs to be done, or reprogrammed. This approach would also push researchers not only to be critical of contemporary instrumentalization of landscape but also to develop and suggest new tools and frameworks for action that enhance more balanced interventions, for the sake of all inhabitants in the city.

REFERENCES

  • Brebbia, C.A. (2000) The Sustainable city: Urban regeneration and sustainability. Boston, MA: MIT Press.
  • Burton, E., Jenks, M. and Williams, K. (2003) The Compact City: A Sustainable Urban Form? New York: Routledge.
  • Brenner, N. and Schmid, C. (2015) Towards a new epistemology of the urban? City, 19, pp. 151–182. 
  • Duany, A. (2000) Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Point Press.
  • Grove, K. (2014) Agency, affect, and the immunological politics of disaster resilience. Environment and Planning D, 32(2), pp. 240–256. 
  • Godschalk, D.R. (2002) Urban hazard mitigation: creating resilient cities. Natural Hazards Review, 4(3), pp. 136–143. 
  • Haughton, G. (1999) Environmental justice and the sustainable city. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 18(3), pp. 233–243. 
  • Jabareen, Y. (2013) Planning the resilient city: concepts and strategies for coping with climate change and environmental risk. Cities, 31, pp. 220–229. 
  • Jenks, M. and Jones, C. (eds.) (2010) Dimensions of the Sustainable City. Berlin: Springer.
  • Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed.) (2002) Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
  • Mossop, E. (2006) Landscapes of infrastructure, in Charles Waldheim (ed.) The Landscape Urbanism Reader, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 163–177.
  • Mostafavi, M. and Doherty, G. (eds.) (2016) Ecological Urbanism. Zurich: Lars Müller..
  • Pelling, M. (2003) The Vulnerability of Cities, Natural Disasters and Social Resilience. London: Earthscan. 
  • Pickett, S.T.A., Cadenasso, M.L. and Grove, J.M. (2004) Resilient cities: meaning, models, and metaphor for integrating the ecological, socio-economic, and planning realms. Landscape and Urban Planning, 69(4), pp. 369–384.
  • Terrin, J. (ed.) (2013) Jardins en ville. Villes en jardin. Paris: Parenthèses.
  • Scheer, B. (2011) Metropolitan form and landscape urbanism, in Banerjee, T. and Loukaitou-Sideris, A. (eds.) Companion to Urban Design. London: Routledge, pp. 611–618.
  • Steiner, F. (2011) Landscape ecological urbanism: origins and trajectories. Landscape and Urban Planning, 100(4), pp. 333–337. 
  • UN-HABITAT (2011) Urban Humanitarian Crisis: UN-HABITAT in Disaster and Conflict Contexts. Available at: http://mirror.unhabitat.org/pmss/listItemDetails.aspx?publicationID=3195.
  • Vale, L.J. (2014) The politics of resilient cities: whose resilience and whose city? Building Research & Information, 42(2), pp. 191–201.
  • Vale, L.J. and Campanella, T.J. (2005) The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Waldheim C. (ed.) (2006) The Landscape Urbanism Reader. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 
  • Wheeler, S.M. and  Beatley, T. (eds.) (2008) Sustainable Urban Development Reader, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
  • Zhang, Y. (2010) Residential housing choice in a multihazard environment: implications for natural hazards mitigation and community environmental justice. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 30(2), pp. 117–131. 
 
 
Built Environment
Landscape planning, city planning, sustainability

Branded Landscapes in Contemporary Cities

About this issue

Issue number

Summary

To what extent have we commodified landscapes and nature? How has this commodification influenced life in the city, including urban processes? Where do efforts to reclaim space within the city for nature fit in the power dynamics within cities? The papers in this issue present three perspectives on this instrumentalization of landscape and nature in cities: the paradigmatic, the urban and regional, and the local/personal.

Tali Hatuka, Cristina Mattiucci
05 Oct 2018

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Contents

 
Cover image: Aerial view of St Stephen’s Green in the centre of Dublin. (Photo: CC Dronepicr, edited by King of Hearts)
 
Built Environment

Cognition and the City: An Introduction

About this issue

Issue number
Volume 44 – Number 2

Summary

The contributors to this issue explore the integration of two disciplinary domains – cognition as studied mainly in cognitive science, and cities as studied in disciplines such as urban studies, urban geography and architecture.

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As the title indicates, this special issue brings together two disciplinary domains: cognition as studied mainly in cognitive science, and cities as studied in disciplines such as urban studies, urban geography, architecture and the like. The first, cognitive science – The Mind’s New Science (Gardner, 1987) – is a very young discipline. It emerged in the mid 1950s out of a rebellion against the doctrine of behaviourism that dominated the behavioural sciences in the first half of the twentieth century. The second, the study of cities, is rather old with roots in antiquity in the writings of first-century BC Roman architect Vitruvius and Palladio in the renaissance. The first’s main focus of interest is the world inside the brain, while the second deals with the world outside. The first attempts to be associated with the natural sciences, while the second is part of what Herbert Simon (1969 [1996]) has termed The Sciences of the Artificial. And yet, the two are interrelated. Several cognitive science’s streams, namely, Gibson’s (1979) ecological approach, embodied cognition (Varela et al., 1994), the extended mind (Clark and Chalmers 1998) suggest that the mind extends into the external environment. In Nobel laurate E. Kandel’s (2012, p. 284) words on the visual system:

Thus, we live in two worlds at once, and our ongoing visual experience is a dialogue between the two: the outside world that enters through the fovea and is elaborated in a bottom-up manner, and the internal world of the brain’s perceptual, cognitive and emotional models that influences information from the fovea in a top-down manner.

In parallel, in the domain of cities, several streams turned their attention to the internal world. In 1960, architect Kevin Lynch published his The Image of the City with the aim of finding what it is in the external world, that is in the city, that makes it legible and imageable. About a decade later urban geographers developed the notion of mental maps (Gould and White, 1974) in an attempt to provide the positivist location theories, that then dominated human geography and urban studies, a more realistic perspective on human behaviour in the environment and specifically in cities. Their basic suggestion was that a person’s location in space has an influence on his/her spatial perception and as a consequence on location decisions. Then, students of mental maps in conjunction with those of Lynch’s Image incorporated psychologist Eduard Tolman’s (1948) seminal paper ‘Cognitive maps in rats and men’, and made the three notions – mental maps, images and cognitive maps – the foundations for behavioural geography. Since the 1990s, with the growing influence of cognitive science and in conjunction with GIS, behavioural geography gradually turned into cognitive geography (Montello, 2018; Portugali, 2018).

Lynch’s main interest in the ‘image of the city’ was the city itself – its morphology and urban landscape. However, in the context of behavioural and cognitive geography the interest shifted from the city to behaviour in space and then to spatial cognition. The city itself became just a passive environment by means of, and within which, behaviour and cognition can be studied; very much in line with the role of the external environment in cognitive science in general. In the latter, the focus of interest was and still is one-sidedly on the details of the inner world, even in the above noted ecological-embodied-extended mind approaches. ‘… to my knowledge’, writes Kelso (2016, p. 5) in a recent study of the emergence of agency in a human infant out of the interaction between the infant and a mobile in the environment, ‘not a single study has recorded the motion of the mobile, thereby obviating the possibility of obtaining any information about its relation to the baby’s movements’. Thus, despite Lynch’s image of the city and the fact that many, if not most, behavioural-cognitive geographical studies were associated with cities, the links between the ‘motion of the city’ and human cognition did not originate here; it originated in three other research fields whose main concern (similarly to Lynch’s) was the city itself: Christopher Alexander’s pattern language, Bill Hillier’s space syntax and, complexity theories of cities (CTC).

According to Alexander (1979, pp. 49–50), cities are products of a language of patterns – a ‘complex set of interacting rules … [reside] … in people’s heads and are responsible for the way the environment gets its structure’. Similar to Gestalt patterns and to Chomsky’s generative ‘internal language’, Alexander’s pattern language is innate to the human mind and thus prior to and beyond culturally related specific urban morphologies. However, it differs from Chomsky’s in that Alexander’s patterns are like ‘the semantic structure … which connects words together – such as “fire” being connected to “burn”, “red” to “passion”’ (Alexander interviewed by Grabow, 1983, p. 50).

Hillier’s focus is on ‘syntax’ – in the case of cities, the syntax of the urban space (Hillier, 2012, 1996; Hillier and Hanson, 1984). The pattern of street networks in cities, suggested Hillier, functions in a way similar to syntax in language. Similar to language in which the relationship between words in their ordering determines the meaning of a sentence, so in a city the relationship between streets in ordering determines the meaning of the urban landscape and as a consequence the behaviour of people in it.

Unlike Hillier’s and Alexander’s approaches to cities, which from the start were associated with cognition, CTC – Complexity Theories of Cities, started with no such association. This domain of studies emerged in the last three decades as an approach that applies the various theories of complexity to the study of cities, their planning and design (Batty, 2013; Portugali, 2011; Portugali et al., 2012; Portugali and Stolk, 2016). Studies in this domain demonstrate that like natural complex systems, cities too are complex self-organized and organizing systems that emerge bottom-up and exhibit phenomena of chaos, fractal structure and the like. The link between CTC and cognition follows, firstly, the fact that the mind/brain is regarded as the ultimate complex system. Secondly that, as elaborated by Portugali (2011), a deeper understanding of human behaviour in cities requires making links to cognitive science.

From the discussion above it follows that linking Cognition and the City – the aim of the present special theme issue – requires an integration between the research domains just surveyed. And indeed, the first paper by Portugali and Haken suggests such an integration. The other papers in this special issue shed light on several aspects of such an integration. Thus, the second paper by Penn, puts Cognition and the City in the wider time context of human evolution. Paper three by Blumenfeld-Lieberthal et al. explores the morphological properties that typify a city. The paper by Ishikawa that follows, the fourth in the list, explores Cognition and the City in terms of people–environment interrelations. The next paper by Omer exposes the links between ‘systematic distortions in cognitive maps’ and the morphological properties of their superordinate geographical context. The sixth paper by Bae and Montello is a case study illustrating the nature of a city’s perceptual boundaries, while the seventh paper, by Kondyli and Bhatt, discusses navigation in large-scale urban structures that are becoming more and more dominant in cities.

There is no need to say more here about the various papers and their points of view; the papers do this themselves in the most appropriate ways: they speak for themselves while their abstracts describe the essence of each paper. Instead I’ll close with reference to Kandel’s statement at the beginning of this introduction. Namely, that ‘we live in two worlds at once’, that our experience ‘is a dialogue between the two: the outside world … and the internal world…’. This dialogue, as is well recorded, has shaped humans’ cognitive evolution for thousands of years. For most of this time, the outside world was in fact, Nature and the elements of which it is composed: animals trees, stars and all the rest. This is not the case anymore: in a world where more than half of the population live in cities, for most newborns the first things that they see when they open their eyes are not trees, birds or stars, but rather buildings, cars, machines and other artificial elements that make a City. And yet, in the domain of cognition, the City of the ‘Cognition and the City’ dyad has so far been discussed mainly implicitly and as a kind of by-product: as means to expose the ‘really interesting’ internal world of entities such as cognitive maps, images, spatial perception and the like. In parallel, in the study of cities, where the main focus was traditionally on economics, society, culture and politics, the Cognition of the dyad entered the discussion for the most part as means to improve our understanding of urban agents’ decision-making. It seems that it is time for the Cognition and the City dyad to become an explicit domain of study for its own sake. This special issue is a modest step towards this aim.

References

  • Alexander, C. (1979) The Timeless Way of Building. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Batty, M. (2013) The New Science of Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Clark, A. and Chalmers, D. (1998) The extended mind. Analysis, 58(1), pp. 7–19.
  • Gardner, H. (1987) The Mind’s New Science. New York: Basic Books.
  • Gibson, J.J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin.
  • Gould P. and White R.R. (1974) Mental maps. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
  • Grabow, S. (1983) Christopher Alexander: The Search for a New Paradigm in Architecture. London: Oriel Press.
  • Hillier, B. (2012) The genetic code for cities: is it simpler than we think? in Portugali, J., Meyer, H., Stolk, E. and Tan, E. (eds.) Complexity Theories of Cities have Come of Age. Berlin: Springer.
  • Hillier, B. (1996) Space is the Machine: A Configurational Theory of Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Hillier, B. and Hanson, J. (1984) The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Kandel, E. (2012). The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present. New York: Random House.
  • Kelso, J.A.S. (2016) On the self-organizing origins of agency. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(7), pp. 490–499.
  • Lynch, K. (1960) The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Montello, D. Ed. (2018) Handbook of Behavioral and Cognitive Geography. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
  • Portugali, J. (2011) Complexity, Cognition and the City. Berlin: Springer.
  • Portugali, J. (2018) History and theoretical perspectives of behavioral and cognitive geography, in Montello, D. (ed.) Handbook of Behavioral and Cognitive Geography. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 16–38.
  • Portugali, J., Meyer H., Stolk, E. and Tan, E. (eds.) (2012) Complexity Theories of Cities have Come of Age. Berlin: Springer.
  • Portugali, J. and Stolk, E. (eds.) (2016) Complexity, Cognition, Urban Planning and Design. Berlin: Springer.
  • Simon, H.A. (1969 [1996]) The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Tolman, E.C. (1948) Cognitive maps in rats and men. Psychological Review, 55, pp. 189–208.
  • Varela, F.J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1994) The Embodied Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
 
Built Environment
cognitive mapping, wayfinding, spatial cognition, the image of the city

'Cognition and the City: An Introduction'

The contributors to this issue explore the integration of two disciplinary domains – cognition as studied mainly in cognitive science, and cities as studied in disciplines such as urban studies, urban geography and architecture.

About this issue

Issue number

Summary

The contributors to this issue explore the integration of two disciplinary domains – cognition as studied mainly in cognitive science, and cities as studied in disciplines such as urban studies, urban geography and architecture.

Juval Portugali
16 Jul 2018

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Contents

Forthcoming issues include: Branded Landscapes in Contemporary Cities; Sharing Space: Sharing Practices and Shared Spaces in the City; Changing Patterns of Commuting to and in the City

The Contributors

Crystal Bae is a PhD student in the Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her master’s research explored urban residents’ understanding of the cognitive boundaries of their neighbourhood, focusing on the physical and social features of the environment. Her PhD focuses on aspects of social interaction within paired route planning and navigation. Her research interests are in the areas of spatial cognition, navigation, and wayfinding, especially in relation to the urban built environment.

Mehul Bhatt is Professor in the School of Science and Technology at Örebro University, Sweden and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bremen, Germany, where he leads the Human-Centred Cognitive Assistance Lab. He is director of the research and consulting group DesignSpace, and he has recently launched CoDesign Lab EU, an initiative aimed at addressing the confluence of Cognition, AI, Interaction and Design. His research encompasses artificial intelligence, spatial cognition and computation, visual perception, and human-computer interaction.

Efrat Blumenfeld-Lieberthal is a Senior Lecturer in the David Azrieli School of Architecture, Tel Aviv University and a member of the founding team of City Center, the Tel Aviv University Research Center for Cities and Urbanism. Her research interests are applying theories of complexity to urban environments; urban morphology; size distribution of entities in complex systems; and complex networks in urban and human systems. Recently, she has been focusing on smart cities and the way they influence urban development.

Hermann Haken was Professor of Theoretical Physics at Stuttgart University from 1960 to 1997. He has been visiting scientist/professor in China, England, France, japan, USA. He is one of the fathers of laser theory, and initiated synergetics that deals with the self-organization of structures and functions in complex systems. He developed mathematical tools and general concepts, that have found applications in fields ranging from physics and chemistry to biology and neuroscience, cognitive science and information. He was founder and editor of the Springer Series in Synergetics.

Toru Ishikawa is a Professor at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies at the University of Tokyo. He specializes in cognitive-behavioural geography and geographic information science. His research interests include human spatial cognition and behaviour, wayfinding and navigation, and spatial thinking in geoscience.

Vasiliki Koydyli is a PhD candidate in the School of Science and Technology at Örebro University, Sweden. She is an architect by training and since 2016 has been a member of the DesignSpace (www.design-space.org) first as guest researcher, then as research assistant. Her research interests include spatial cognition, environmental psychology, design computing and cognition, and evidence-based design.

Elya L. Milner graduated from the Tel Aviv University School of Architecture, Magna Cum Laude. After several years working as an architect in private firms, she began a combined MA and PhD track at the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University, under the supervision of Professor Haim Yacobi. Her PhD research focuses on the construction of rights, belonging and entitlement in and to the Israeli-Palestinian contested space. 

Daniel R. Montello is Professor of Geography and Affiliated Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  His research is in the areas of spatial, environmental, and geographic perception, cognition, affect, and behaviour. Dan has authored or co-authored some100 articles and chapters, and co-authored or edited six books. He currently co-edits the academic journal Spatial Cognition and Computation.

Itzhak Omer is Professor of Urban and Social Geography in the Department of Geography and the Human Environment and Head of the Urban Space Analysis Laboratory at Tel Aviv University. His areas of academic interest include urban modelling, agent-based models, urban morphology, movement, spatial behaviour and cognition, urban systems and social geography of the city. His research examines processes connecting urban built environments to spatial behaviour and cognition, movement, and the formation of social and functional urban areas. He also develops agent-based models for simulating and modelling motorized and non-motorized movements in planned or in existing urban environments.

Alan Penn is Professor of Architectural and Urban Computing, and Dean of The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment at University College London. His research is into the effect of the spatial design of the built environment on the social and economic function of organisations and communities.

Juval Portugali is Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography and the Human Environment, Tel Aviv University. Head of City Center, Tel Aviv University Center for Cities and Urbanism, and of the Environmental Simulation Laboratory (ESLab). His research integrates complexity and self-organization theories, environmental-spatial cognition, urban dynamics and planning in modern and ancient periods. His publications include more than 70 research articles and 16 books.

Nimrod Serok is a PhD candidate at the Azrieli School of Architecture at Tel Aviv University, where he also completed his BArch and MArch (both first in his class). His work focuses on urban complexity with an emphasis on urban mobility patterns and spatio-temporal data analysis. He is experienced as a practicing architect and urban planner.

 

Built Environment

Editorial: Inclusive Design: Towards Social Equity in the Built Environment

About this issue

Issue number
Volume 44 – Number 1

Summary

The papers in this issue aim to present wider considerations of inclusive design, for the practitioners, educators and theorists behind this specific people-centred engagement.

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As this special issue of Built Environment on Inclusive Design was coming to fruition, an article in The Guardian posed the question ‘what would a truly disabled-accessible city look like?’ (Salman, 2018). The piece identified that globally by 2050, 940 million people with disabilities will live in cities (this equates to 15 per cent of all urban dwellers) resulting in the United Nations declaring that the inaccessibility of our built environment is a ‘major challenge’. Salman’s article also presented an economic value to poor access – in the UK this is estimated to be £212bn (known as the purple pound), with an accessible tourism market estimated at £12bn. The article then presented a series of cases from around the world to highlight how greater access to the built environment was being achieved through design. This included the ‘traditional’ focus of inclusive design in considering the needs of our ageing and disabled populations (with an emphasis on mobility and sight), as well as considerations for citizens (or city/sens – citizens of urban environments who experience sensory barriers) on the autistic spectrum.

While these innovations should be welcomed and celebrated, they also require a degree of careful consideration. The critical access theorist Aimi Hamraie has challenged many inclusive, universal and ‘design for all’ responses that have sought to include ‘everyone’ by asking ‘who counts as everyone and how designers can know?’ (Hamraie, 2017, p. 261). Given this perspective how might inclusive design further social equity in the built environment? All too often an inclusive approach can consider the needs of one group of users to the detriment of another. This has been most commonly adopted in the design of streets and public spaces in the generic use of textured, tactile or ‘blister’ paving as navigational direction for blind and vision impaired people. Yet for older people, people who use wheelchairs or scooters (Omerod et al 2014) or have artificial lower limbs (Bichard, 2015) this design intervention has created further barriers to accessing curb cuts (in itself a defining symbol of access to the built environment (Haimraie, 2017)). Often many of the interventions in the built environment that are considered ‘inclusive’ such as tactile paving, ramps, hearing loops, and even the accessible toilet should be considered more in line with design for ‘special needs’ (Hanson, 2002). Hence the inclusive design project for the built environment continues to be an urgent and ongoing priority that offers opportunities for innovation and collaboration but, more importantly, extends access beyond being merely a function of the built environment. Rather it is a crucial element that incorporates human diversity and potential within our natural environment.

Inclusive design within the UK initially focused on the needs of the ageing population (Coleman, 1994); this was then extended to include disabled people (Keates et al., 2000). More recently, wider social factors including economic exclusion have also come into the inclusive design framework, and this has included extending user participation from ‘extreme users’ (Coleman, 1994), user groups (Dong et al., 2005) to wider cross community participation (Bichard et al., 2018) to incorporate and develop design knowledge of functional access in more creative and innovative forms.

The contributors to this issue of Built Environment represent a series of researchers who are extending inclusive design knowledge, in teaching, practice and thinking. What this issue does not include is consideration of user engagement. Inclusive design has tended to assume that mere consultation will result in favourable design outcomes, but often this consultation itself requires careful consideration and creative engagement for both the users and the designers. Methods for engagement have become the focus of their own specific design discourses including participatory and co-design, and are context led. While offering a wide spectrum of creative engagement for users and designers, such narratives are worthy of their own publications and special editions, and therefore have not been included in this special edition.

Instead the papers presented here represent a series of wider considerations for readers of Built Environment (the users). The first paper by Scott, McLachlan and Brookfield lay the foundation of this issue where many built environment professional careers begin; training in architectural schools. Scott et al. describe three innovative projects from the architectural school that not only engage key levels of the education but also actively extend inclusive design engagement from the older user to the citizen. The first two cases identify how communication between designer and user are essential, requiring the designer to step back from the education bubble of design school rhetoric. Their third example illustrates how the regulation and design code that informs design for access, such as Building Regulations and British Standards, can be seen as tools for innovation – therefore meeting the legislative requirements and extending the design guidance whilst offering creative engagement for designers and innovative potential outcomes for users.

The second paper of this issue introduces the inclusive design paradox. Heylighen and Bianchin show how the uptake of inclusive design has been limited, and whilst some of this might be considered a lack of engagement of inclusive design within the education of built environment professionals (Scott et al.), there is also the consideration of wider conflicting issues and the influence of design on users. Heylighen and Bianchin present this as the paradox which focuses on a question of justice and which the authors navigate through the work of moral and political philosopher John Rawls to explore questions of justice in design and how the architects of the built environment might extend design for fairness. The authors present a series of specific design outcomes they consider as having challenged this paradox of inclusive design.

The third paper introduces ‘auraldiversity’ as a specific oversight within inclusive design of the built environment. Renel shows how design has focused on an auraltypical perspective. This can be extended within inclusive design to suggest that an element of ‘typical’ user-centred design has focused on specific disabilities. By introducing auraldiversity, Renel reveals the complexity and richness of hearing, and highlights that maybe this has been difficult to focus on within inclusive design research and that such diversity cannot be met by a single-issue response such as the hearing induction loop. Again, the focus on a specific aspect of human physical diversity can be extended to consider shared commonalities across spectrums and incorporated into a wider inclusive design investigation between disciplines. By introducing the reader to three aurally diverse participants, Renel highlights how negative and positive aspects of the built environment can impact their lives.

From a focus in a specific diversity, a specific element of the built environment is investigated in the fourth article in this issue. Ramster, Greed and Bichard present the challenge of toilet provision as essential for mobility in the built environment, but facing current challenges with regards to perceived legitimate access to provision. This case illustrates how, without wider consultation, design considerations regarded inclusive can become exclusive. This was manifested most recently in the emergence of gender neutral toilet provision: signage change rather than wider design consideration and possible innovation resulted in news headlines and controversy at the most basic of design intervention requirements of the built environment.

In their book Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability, Aimi Hamraie challenged the origins of universal and inclusive design as the result of specific progressive legislation (such as the American with Disabilities Act) to reveal the politics and discourses that contribute to knowledge making of design and the specific bodies design responded to. The work has been described by leading inclusive design in the built environment theorist Rob Imrie as a major text that will reconstruct how ‘we think about access, disability and design’. In their essay for this issue Hamraie presents new research that extends the lens of inclusive considerations to explore wider discussions of health and wellness/wellbeing that pervade many city design projects, highlighting that certain design rhetorics that masquerade as sustainable (and by association inclusive) are essentially designing the exclusion of certain socio/economic populations. This is especially explored in the notion of making areas of cities ‘liveable’ that suggests these current spaces are unliveable, despite people living there. In line with the critical access approach outlined in their book, Hamraie shows, maybe somewhat uncomfortably for inclusive design practitioners, how the focus of this design approach has predominantly centred on making bodies more productive with no critical consideration of the wider neoliberal ideology that drives city redesign. Hamraie’s critical access studies can be considered an active companion to inclusive design.

The final paper in this issue focuses on one of the most horrific incidents of built environment design to have occurred in the UK. The fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017 resulted in the loss of seventy-one lives. Evans continues his previous work on the challenges of designing sustainably and inclusively to show how these design approaches continue to be mutually exclusive, in which due to government targets, sustainability and a buildings performance is often a higher priority than the requirements of the users of the building. Evans also shows that an inclusive approach – especially in the design of housing, does not necessarily mean the creation of new knowledge, but that a previous legacy of innovative inclusive design can be re-examined.

The papers in this issue aim to present wider considerations of inclusive design, for the practitioners, educators and theorists behind this specific people-centred engagement. They are not intended to be solutions to the problem, rather they reveal the complexity of inclusion that requires greater research and engagement with populations in recognition of the diversity of those who inhabit the built environment.

References

  • Bichard, J. (2015) Extending Architectural Affordance; The Case of the Publicly Accessible Toilet. PhD Thesis, University College London. Available at: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1467131/2/Bichard%202014%20Res.pdf.
  • Bichard, J., Alwani, R., Raby, E., West, J. and Spencer, J. (2018) Creating an inclusive architectural intervention as a research space to explore community wellbeing, in Langdon, P., Lazar, J., Heylighen, A. and Dong, H. (eds.) Breaking Down Barriers. New York: Springer.
  • Dong, H., Clarkson, P.J., Cassim, J. and Keates, S. (2005) Critical user forums – an effective user research method for inclusive design. The Design Journal, 8(2), pp. 49–59.
  • Coleman R. (1994) The case for inclusive design – an overview, in Proceedings of the 12th Triennial Congress of the International Ergonomics Association. Mississauga, Ontario: Human Factors Association of Canada.
  • Hamraie, A. (2017) Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 
  • Hanson, J. (2002) The inclusive city: what active ageing might mean for urban design, in Maltby, T. (ed.) Active Ageing: Myth or Reality? Proceedings of the British Society of Gerontology 31st Annual Conference. Birmingham: University of Birmingham. 
  • Keates, S., Clarkson, P. J., Harrison, L.A. and Robinson, P. (2000) Towards a practical inclusive design approach, in Thomas, J. (ed.) Proceeding of CUU’00: ACM Conference on Universal Usability. New York: ACM, pp. 45–52. 
  • Omerod, M., Newton, R., MacLennan, H., Faruk, M., Thies, S., Kennedy, L., Howard, D. and Nester, C. (2014) Older people’s experiences of using tactile paving. Municipal Engineer, 168(1), pp. 3–10. 
  • Salman, S. (2018) What would a truly disabled-accessible city look like? The Guardian, 14 February. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/feb/14/what-disability-accessibl....
 
Built Environment

Meet the editor

About this issue

Issue number
Volume 44 – Number 1

Summary

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Jo-Anne Bichard is Senior Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. She is a design anthropologist whose research involves multi/inter-disciplinary collaboration and participatory engagement in the inclusive design process. Her primary research theme focuses on design for wellbeing in the built environment. With Gail Ramster, Jo-Anne is co-creator of The Great British Public Toilet Map and was runner up in the ESRC’s Outstanding Impact in Society award. Jo-Anne’s PhD ‘Extending Architectural Affordance; the case of the Publicly Accessible Toilet’ explored inclusive spatial, product and service design as crucial elements to afford access for users across abilities and age. She has published extensively on toilet design from an inclusive perspective.

Built Environment
inclusive design, design and diversity, design and social equity

Inclusive Design: Towards Social Equity in the Built Environment

The papers in this issue aim to present wider considerations of inclusive design, for the practitioners, educators and theorists behind this specific people-centred engagement. They are not intended to be solutions to the problem, rather they reveal the complexity of inclusion that requires greater research and engagement with populations in recognition of the diversity of those who inhabit the built environment.

About this issue

Issue number

Summary

The papers in this issue aim to present wider considerations of inclusive design, for the practitioners, educators and theorists behind this specific people-centred engagement.

Dr Jo-Anne Bichard
20 Apr 2018

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Contents

 

Cover image: The Great Divide 2017
Maslen & Mehra
Sculpture: Wire, Papier-mâché, archival photo decoupage
74cm diameter

 

Built Environment

High-Rise Urbanism in Contemporary Europe

About this issue

Issue number
Volume 43 – Number 4

Summary

This issue of Built Environment explores the processes of contemporary European urban verticalization and examines what these recent upward trajectories indicate about the social, political, economic and cultural dynamics of European urbanization.

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Europe has witnessed during the twenty first century its greatest ever period of high-rise construction. From London to Rotterdam, Barcelona, Moscow, Madrid, Vienna, Milan, Turin, paris, Lyon and warsaw, European city skylines have become higher, denser and more diverse. after a fallow period during which very few towers were built (1980–2000), European cities are currently experi-encing a renewed interest in this architectural form, following in the footsteps of the United states and emerging economies. while the resurgence of skyscrapers in Europe has, to date, been somewhat modest in terms of height compared to the Middle East or south-east asia, it has reached unprecedented pro-portions in a significant number of European countries, exceeding the post-war boom period,prompting the need to assess the nature of this upward urban growth (figure 1).
This issue of Built Environment explores the processes of contemporary European urban verticalization and examines what these re-cent upward trajectories indicate about the social, political, economic and cultural dy-namics of European urbanization. Through a combination of particular case-studies across Europe with wider analyses of national and international trends, the issue investigates the relationship in European cities between high-rise built fabric and planning regimes, finan-cial flows, cultural representations, technical innovations, and forms of modernist heritage. Developing cross-disciplinary perspectives and engagement with both academic and practitioner insights, the issue provides an initial assessment of high-rise Europe in the context of a wider world of vertical urbanisms (Graham and Hewitt, 2013; Harris, 2015).
 
European cities occupy a special place in the modern history of vertical urbanism. while European industrial architectural and engineering research inspired the construc-tion  of  the  first  skyscrapers  in  the  United States (Cohen, 1995), North american vertical architecture became in turn a key reference for post-war European planners in modern-izing urban centres (destroyed by conflict and plagued by housing shortages) according to a modernist perspective largely inspired by the circulation of references from across the atlantic (Gartman, 2000). However, contrary to its North american model, European post-war vertical urbanism was characterized by a culture of large-scale urban planning which was mainly the product of highly centralized forms  of  state  intervention,  a  configuration that helped create distinctive types of Europeanhigh-rise housing  (figure  2).  This  includedthe role for new architectural and structural standards, technological innovations and a shared culture of urban engineering in de-fining  a  vertical  urbanism  that  spread  well beyond European national borders (Tailland-ier et al., 2009). For example, many French architects and engineers of the post-war ‘re-construction’ period started their career in co-lonial cities before coming back to the French urban metropole where they applied their expertise (picard, 1994; Fredenucci, 2003; Kasmi, 2017). This expertise was then further circulated to be applied in post-colonial cen-tres, creating a transnational space for Euro-pean modernist urban references and vertical arts de faire (Verdeil, 2012; Beeckmans, 2014; stanek, 2012).
The epitome of the architectural modern-ization of European cities in the post-war period, high-rise urbanism was initially char-acterized by the construction of large-scale residential developments made of slab and point blocks and sometimes large-scale con-crete platforms which, following Corbusian principles of modernist urban planning, sep-arated  high-rises  from  traffic  infrastructure and historic centres (Esher, 1981; Monclus and Dies Medina, 2016). High-rise urbanism was then an essential feature of the expansion of Fordist developmentalist states in western and Eastern European countries (swenarton et al., 2014; Hatherley, 2016). as Jacobs et al.(2012, p. 132) argue, it was ‘the materialisation of a specific modernising vision for cities and city life, one that joined the progressive ethos of state-led welfarism with a modernist ar-chitectural aesthetics’. During this high-risepeak, architectural and urbanism referencesfollowed similar developments acrossEurope with a large number of slab-blocks built on the outskirts of towns and cities, re-flecting the importance of decision processes centralized by the post-war central state. But, as Turkington et al. note in their 2004 study, European cities then diverged with regards to the construction and dissemination of a high-rise urbanism. In western Europe most of the high-rise construction stopped in the 1980s, but the building of high-rise residential estates continued in Eastern European cities into the 1990s (Turkington et al., 2004, p. 266) (figure 3).
During the 1970s and 1980s, European high-rise urbanism became the locus for long-standing processes of demonization and stigmatization following a series of isolated incidents such as the collapse of Ronan point Tower in London (1968), the demise of large-scale social housing projects in France (Kad-dour, 2016), the broader restructuring and privatization of public housing in most Eu-ropean countries (power, 1993; sailer-Fliege, 1999) and the controversies that followed the construction  of  stand-alone  high-rise  office towers such as Tour Montparnasse in paris or Centre point in London. Having been one of the fields of experimentation for vertical ur-banism, several European cities experienceda reaction against high-rises that correlatedwith the institutionalization of forms ofheritage protection. after modernism, came the valuing of more pastiche or postmodern forms of urbanism, putting the accent more on morphological continuity and the conser-vation of historic urban centres (appleyard, 1979; Delafons, 1998; Glauser, 2016). Many heritage lobbies, which became major play-ers in the contemporary regulation of urban planning in European cities, were created in reaction to reconstruction and modernization projects (Backouche, 2016). The contemporary wave of verticalization must be understood in reference to these multiple legacies of a disputed vertical urban past, and is a distinc-tive feature of the European high-rise context(figure 4).
Nevertheless, the protected skylines of European cities have been troubled in the last 15 years by new waves of tall build-ings and high-rise residential structures, a tendency which has not been limited to the main global urban centres and is affecting a diverse range of cities (Drozdz and appert, 2012). The number of towers currently under construction exceeds the post-war boom pe-riod and high-rises are once again finding a certain legitimacy in European cities (appert, 2016). This contemporary high-rise urbanism in Europe comes in different sizes and forms. while the resurgence of skyscrapers has been a major phenomenon, including those that had put in place the most drastic anti-tower legislation after the modernist period, the process of verticalization in Europe has been far from linear, has not necessarily happened in the same type of locations, and has not pro-duced an urban form with unified properties.
 
The comparison of the spatial distribution of towers built in the 1980s and during the post-2000 period reflects the diversity of loca-tions for new towers in the last 10 years. Until the 2000s, the verticalization of European cen-tres corresponded to a piecemeal moderniza-tion of business districts that accompanied the rise of global finance in property markets for office buildings (Lizieri, 2009). The construc-tion of new towers in Europe was then main-ly  limited  to  international  financial  centres where the progressive elevation of heights contrasted with the sprawl of low- and me-dium-density suburbs around them and the diffusion of blanket regulations over historic centres (for instance, La Défense vs Central paris, or Donau City vs Vienna inside the Ring). During the 2000s, on the other hand, tower projects proliferated in European cit-ies, a process that can be understood as very much part of globalization and the financial-ization of real estate, even in cities that seem to be more marginal to these hyper-specula-tive economic markets (figure 5).
In cities such as Madrid, Milan, Turin or paris, a few monumental towers have come to break the silhouette of the cityscape, but with-out reaching the extent of London, where, as of 1 January 2015, more than 400 tower proj-ects were proposed, approved or under con-struction. The Chamartín district of Madrid has become home to the eponymous Cuatro Torres, while Barcelona has gone vertical with urban renewal operations at Fira de Barcelona or Diagonal Mar. south of the alps, Milan has been gracing the covers of specialist journals following the construction of the Bosco Ver-ticale, while Turin, not without opposition, allowed Renzo piano to build Torre san paolo. Further north, the Turning Torso has redefined the image of the city of Malmö in sweden.
 
However, the post-2000 boom in vertical construction in Europe is not necessarily ex-emplified  in  super-tall  futuristic  structures like those in Middle Eastern and asian cities, but  in  supposedly  compact  energy-efficient residential urban blocks according to new high-rise urbanism principles. woven into the existing city fabric, these projects are often framed from the ground up, as initia-tives to reinvigorate local deprived or de-in-dustrialized neighbourhoods and to create urban amenities around transport nodes, embodying new sets of discourses and prac-tices among built environment professionals and planning authorities (appert, 2012). The particular historical context in urban Europe also gives much strength to heritage and con-servation groups and lobbies who strongly shape the height outlines of the European urban landscape, prompting the need to ex-amine closely the conditions of the emergence of a (renewed) European urban vernacular of contemporary high-rise urbanism (figure 6).
Considering this diversity of contempo-rary forms of high-rise urbanism, this issue ofBuilt Environment explores a range of practicesand manifestations across Europe accord-ing to three main perspectives: (i) politicaleconomy; (ii) heritage and planning; and (iii) symbolic landscapes. The first of these con-cerns contemporary high-rise construction, demolition and maintenance, and is a core component of the papers by Craggs, Lenne, Huré et al., and Charney and Rosen. Follow-ing  seminal  works  on  the  role  of  financial intermediaries and instruments in the verti-calization of North-american cities (weber, 2015), these four papers explore how Europe-an cities are located on the emerging global map of investment flows and trace back the genealogy of entrepreneurial forms of verti-calization which started in the 1970s. They offer insights to evolutions within internationalfinancial systems to show how the creation of new investment vehicles like REITs (Real Es-tate Investment Trusts) are driving (some of) the verticalization of European cities.
 
The physics of tall buildings and their ar-chitectural and engineering qualities have been the locus of a renewed interest (al-Kod-many, 2017); however the role of consultants and experts who guide investment and influ-ence decision-makers, prioritize places and participate in the construction of what could be  identified  as  a  European  tower  market remains  underexplored.  In  the  fierce  com-petition between European cities to attract investment, we seem to be witnessing a new common urban rationale in which the pres-ence of high-tech towers would allow urban centres to distinguish themselves and signal their economic dynamism (Grubbauer, 2014). Built and run by a variety of intermediaries, this intra-European market for entrepreneur-ial verticalization is structured by such sig-nals of local economic success. Like any mar-ket, it has echo chambers such as the MIpIM (Le marché international des professionnels de l’immobilier – the International Real Estate Pro-fessionals Trade Show, hosted in Cannes every March), where professionals of this small economic world are now presented with new tower projects, ‘unveiled’ with fanfare to at-tract investment.
 
The paper by Loïse Lenne explores the archaeology of contemporary commercial high-rise urbanism in the City of London by focusing on the history of one particular edifice, the Lloyd’s Building, constructed in 1986 and designed by Richard Rogers and partners. archives and interviews with plan-ners and architects, including Richard Rogers himself, provide the material for a detailed analysis of how the construction of this par-ticular building was a turning point for the theory and practice of high-rise urbanism and tall buildings in the City. Having designed several of its architectural landmarks such as the Lloyd’s Registers, 88 wood street or the recent Leadenhall Building (completed in2014), Rogers and his team have had a consid-erable influence on the physical fabric of the City. Lenne’s paper examines how their first intervention in the square Mile, the Lloyd’s Building, set the principles that still underpin tall buildings projects in the City. Not par-ticularly tall (95 metres high when Tower 42 completed in 1980 reached 183 metres), this building was nonetheless the only building of this size to be allowed at a time when high construction had been banned in the City. The debate around the building introduced new arguments where architectural quality was used as grounds to relax heritage regulations. assessing the architectural qualities of the building, Lenne shows that it also represent-ed a major change in the imaginary of the de-velopment of the City, shifting from compre-hensive public-led urban redevelopments to a piecemeal approach responding to the market needs.
If the architectural principles supporting the current wave of tall buildings in the Cityof London can be traced back to the 1980s, DavidCraggs’s paper explores how the recent surge in skyscrapers has been backed by a partic-ular political economy which appears to beincreasingly entangled with the dynamics of international property markets. Departing from the debates about the contested poli-tics of tall buildings and the management of London’s skyline, this paper assesses the financial  forces  driving  the  contemporary development of skyscrapers in London and questions the apparent consensus among London’s planning industry to supportthis highly speculative stage of high-rise ur-banism.  As  the  2008–2010  crisis  offered  an opportunity for new institutional investors to acquire a share in the prime market of central London, it reinforced the position of London as a magnet for an ever-expanding volume of capital searching for a return through the exploitation of the built environment. But the paper also exposes the fragility of the under-pinnings of this vertical expansion, rooted in a ‘dependency on rising asset-prices, loose monetary policy and the wealth preserving instincts of the global financial elite’. Reflect-ing on the patterns of capital accumulation through the built environment and its polit-ical regulation (or lack of) through planning, the paper also illustrates how the current growth of skyscrapers signals a profound shift in the ideology and spatial imaginaries that supported high-rise urbanism in Europe, particularly during the post-war period. while the commercial skyscrapers used to signal the peak of a building cycle in highly regulated markets, and the mass production of housing was absorbing much of the re-sources (capital and labour), the current pro-liferation of isolated monumental structures serves the purpose of producing a continuous stream of rental revenues for a constellation of investors in a crisis-prone environment. This shift is also manifest in the very physicality of the built environment and the weakening of comprehensive, public-led large-scale urban development projects, progressively replaced by splintered forms of planning (Graham and Marvin, 2001). Interestingly enough, the scale of these rent machines has expanded (santia-go Calavatra’s project for the Greenwich pen-insula has reached the stratospheric price of £1 billion) to the point where whole areas of European cities are again the subject of com-prehensive private-led redevelopment, and developers are reinventing a wholesale high-rise  urbanism  targeted  at  securing  different streams of rental revenues.
 
If understanding how the global restruc-turing of capital flows and the actions of mar-ket intermediaries may help in explaining some of the pressures towards verticalization in European cities, this perspective needs to be supplemented by an exploration of how local political elites and planners also inter-vene in the production of towers. The paper by Maxime Huré, Christian Montès and Manuel appert and that by Gillad Rosen and Igal Charney demonstrate that the somehow counter-intuitive geography of contemporary verticalization in Europe, far from reflecting only the geography and spatial conventions of real-estate experts, finds its root in intense political and regulatory activity that needs to be unpacked. Using, respectively, the cases of Lyon and Jerusalem, they show that the re-emergence of towers in urban centres does  not  always  flag  the  insertion  of  a  city into highly financialized real-estate markets, although it hints at entrepreneurial turning points in their urban policies (Charney and Rosen, 2016; Kaika, 2010). The evolution of the professional culture in architectural firms and planning authorities to adjust to vertical shifts and/or encourage them, and their adaptation to the demands and needs of international consultants is also part of this political mobili-zation. Using numerous planning documents, media coverage and interviews with public figures,  NGOs  and  real-estate  experts,  their papers illustrate how a pro-growth agenda has dominated the development of tall build-ings in both cities and toned down the polem-ics and controversies that characterized the previous rounds of high-rise projects. Both papers reflect on the politics of contemporary high-rise urbanism in each city and explore the response of the public to these important changes. In Jerusalem, where heritage plan-ning and height limitations were introduced by British planners at the turn of the twenti-eth century, high-rises have triggered several waves of opposition coming from both NGOs and heritage experts. The impossibility to discuss in a meaningful manner the intro-duction of new tall buildings in the city and the absence of arenas where this debate could take place finally lead the authors to highlight the post-political or what we could even call non-political qualities of the debate. In Lyon, the introduction of a special policy guidance on tall buildings helped create a consensus among planning and heritage experts, politi-cians and residents’ associations who agreed on containing the construction of tall build-ings near the main train station. However, the authors highlight that the very need for new tall buildings and skyscrapers in an economic context where the demands still seem limited was never openly discussed in public arenas.
 
The second core thematic shaping this issue’s engagement with the dynamics of contemporary high-rise urbanism in Europe concerns planning and heritage, and is a cen-tral aspect of the papers written by Greco and Nijhuis and Van der Hoeven. Looking at the cases of Lyon and Turin, Elena Greco’s paper retraces how planning for tall buildings hasevolved from the 1960s to the new millennium.She  shows  how  the  first  major  wave  oftall buildings in Lyon and Turin during the 1960s and 1970s materialized there the advent of the vertical modern city, yet despite being radically different from what was previous-ly built, high-rise clusters were the result of strong planning regulations and codes that paradoxically related more to the urban fabric of these historic cities than the loose strategic guidelines developed more recently. since the 1990s, in addressing processes of de-indus-trialization and looking for new economic resources, urban planning has become more negotiated, opening up opportunities for pri-vate sector actors to initiate high-rise devel-opments in targeted areas or projets urbains. accompanying forms of urban design have consequently changed, being reduced in scale to specific locations where tall buildings are expected and in the process losing sight of city-wide elements of design. The regulation of the European historic environment through the processes of conservation – institution-alized following effective or proposed radi-cal transformations of cities – has come into direct collision with the latest tall building projects proposed as a means of leveraging economic  development,  fiscal  revenues  and rebranding cities. Steffen Nijhuis and Frank-lin van der Hoeven illustrate this through the case of The Hague considering how high-rises can epitomize the predominance of economic development goals over urban planning principles, including the protection of urban heritage. Both these papers acknow-ledge the lack of consultation and assessment of the landscape impacts of tall buildings in Lyon, Turin and Dutch cities, despite exist-ing tools and methodologies. Nonetheless, as an important rejoinder, Nijhuis and Van der Hoeven demonstrate how visibility analysis can overcome the subjectivity of perceived urban transformations often instrumental-ized in debates surrounding high-rise con-struction. Landscape analysis through GIs-based modelling can often help planners and politicians map the visibility of tall buildings so as to better confine or design tall buildings in relation to the existing urban fabric.
 
The last four papers of the issue, working across  social  policy,  film  studies  and  urban geography, explore how the changing sym-bolic landscapes and cultural representations of high-rise urbanism in contemporary Eu-rope need to be mapped directly onto new class relations and trajectories of neoliberal urbanism. all four of these papers, develop-ing analysis of a range of material including audio-visual texts, planning documents and oral histories, chart in particular how the high-rise residential block has lost much of its post-war egalitarian and modernist social cre-dentials. These have been largely superseded by a strong emphasis on upmarket lifestyles and investment priorities, and in the case of the UK and France have become part of a widespread and systematic programme of so-cial housing demolition. In investigating the key intersections between political and cul-tural dimensions of high-rise life, these four papers not only provide sharp critical per-spectives on the unequal vertical geographies emerging in Europe today, but emphasize how high-rise residential landscapes need to be understood as framed, sustained and ne-gotiated through particular representational strategies and urban visions.
The paper by Essi Viitanen uses an in-depth  analysis  of  four  feature-length  films from the last 5 years set in and around Helsin-ki to examine the relationship between high-rise urbanism and the changing social worlds of the Finnish suburbs, known as lähiö, asso-ciated from the 1950s with state-built mod-ernist housing blocks. Viitanen assesses the way that cinematic space depicts and engages with new forms of everyday lived experience associated with the high-rise landscapes of these marginalized suburbs and the asso-ciated framing and play around themes of constraint, alienation and dysfunction. also providing a focus on the way high-rise urban-ism in Northern Europe has been mediated through film, Pei-Sze Chow’s paper explores screen representations of scandinavia’s tallest building, the Turning Torso (2005) in Malmö, designed by the spanish architect santiago Calatrava, and regarded as the world’s first ‘twisted’ skyscraper. Chow develops a close analysis, rooted in an emphasis on film as a form of social practice, of the documentary film Sossen,Arkitekten och det Skruvade Huset (2005) and the television crime drama series, Bron/Broen (2011–), that has found wide-spread international exposure on the wave ofa ‘Nordic Noir’ trend. Chow uses these filmictexts to detail how this iconic example of high-rise European residential architecture is indicative of sharp tensions between welfare state ideology and neoliberal trajectories of post-industrial urbanism, in this case accom-panying the development of the Øresund region straddling southern sweden and Co-penhagen.
 
This emphasis on the unravelling of wel-farist social policies through dramatically altered high-rise landscapes continues in the final two papers of this issue by Vincent Ves-chambre and Vikki McCall and Gerry Mooney. These take us to France, the European coun-try with the greatest concentration of tower and slab blocks, and Glasgow, the European city with perhaps one of the highest number of high-rise social housing blocks. Both detail a similar story around the changing fortunes for tower-blocks over the last half-century. post-war idealism around their role in urban policy, part of what Veschambre calls an agen-da of ‘monumentalization’ in French social housing, quickly mutated to sustained disin-vestment from the 1970s. Critically, this was accompanied by the architectural discrediting of high-rise blocks and the stark territorial stigmatization of areas where they were con-centrated. The resulting negative narratives and discourses of ‘failure’ surrounding the people and places involved have been used by states and municipalities to justify and nat-uralize their demolition as the only response; a process Veschambre describes as ‘deverti-calization’. The symbolic logic of this agenda of tower demolition perhaps reached an ex-treme apogee in the UK with plans, as McCall and Mooney document, to broadcast globally the blow-down of the Red Road towers in Glasgow as part of the opening ceremony of the 2014 Commonwealth Games.
 
although these four papers portray a downbeat assessment of the socially pro-gressive scope for high-rise living in contem-porary  Europe,  exemplified  by  the  horrific tragedy of the Grenfell Tower in London in June 2017, they also offer crucial ways of re-viewing the place for vertical life in Europe-an cities. whether it is a focus on everyday multi-ethnic practices in suburban Helsinki, isolated examples of tower rehabilitation inthe auvergne-Rhône-alpes region, documen-tary  films  that  highlight  the  contradictionsinherent to iconic vertical development, or the renewed radicalization of the UK’shousing crisis, these papers open up importantnew means of critically deconstructing – and in the process reconstructing – the social and political possibilities for the high-rise in the contemporary European imagination.
 
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Built Environment

Meet the editors

About this issue

Issue number
Volume 43 – Number 4

Summary

This issue of Built Environment explores the processes of contemporary European urban verticalization and examines what these recent upward trajectories indicate about the social, political, economic and cultural dynamics of European urbanization.

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Manuel Appert is a Senior Lecturer in Geography and Planning at Université Lyon 2 and a member of the mixed research unit UMR 5600 – Environnement Ville Société. His research concerns the instrumentalization of architecture in urban governance. He has recently worked on the regulation of tall buildings in London and led a research team on skyline issues in European cities. His more latest work deals with planning regulations and the vertical city.

Martine Drozdz is a member of the French Council for Scientific Research (CNRS). She is a Research Fellow at Laboratoire Techniques Territoires et Sociétés and teaches at Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and at the Paris School of Urban Planning. Her research explores the contemporary dynamics of urban democracy in relation to urban planning through a socio-technical lens, with a focus on London and Paris.

Andrew Harris is a Senior Lecturer in Geography and Urban Studies at University College London, where he convenes the interdisciplinary Urban Studies MSc and is a Co-Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory. His research develops critical perspectives on the role of art, creativity and culture in recent processes of urban restructuring, and on three-dimensional geographies of contemporary cities, especially London and Mumbai.

Built Environment
urban design and planning, architecture

High-Rise Urbanism in Contemporary Europe

This issue of Built Environment explores the processes of contemporary European urban verticalization and examines what these recent upward trajectories indicate about the social, political, economic and cultural dynamics of European urbanization. Through a combination of particular case-studies from across Europe, the issue investigates the relationship in European cities between high-rise built fabric and planning regimes, financial flows, cultural representations, technical innovations, and forms of modernist heritage.

About this issue

Issue number

Summary

This issue of Built Environment explores the processes of contemporary European urban verticalization and examines what these recent upward trajectories indicate about the social, political, economic and cultural dynamics of European urbanization.

Manuel Appert, Martine Drozdz, Andrew Harris
26 Jan 2018

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