The City of Faith
“Information space is the set of concepts and relations among them held by an information system; it describes the range of possible values or meanings an entity can have under the given rules and circumstances” (Wikipedia).
Following on from Kevin Lynch (1960), City of Faith, City as Machine, and City as a an Organism (The Ecological City), I propose developing the idea of the City as Information Space. Firstly something on Lynch’s taxonomy of cities.
“In devising his three normative urban models, Lynch considered how dominant urban actors would structure and organize the relationships of the city if they had absolute power and acted logically. The models are thus deliberate simplifications. The first two, for example – the City of Faith and the City as a Machine – each assume a top-down control by entrenched elites. In the City of Faith, feudal warlords and priests favor stasis, place-making, and a land-based agrarian economy; in the City as Machine, corporate executives and capitalists prefer systems of flow and exchange, of consumption and production, embedded in a space-based, capital-intensive, industrial economy. In the third model, the Ecological City, Lynch imagined a more complex structure in which an elected elite responds to feedback from the city’s inhabitants”. David Grahame Shane, Recombinant Urbanism 39.
Lynch’s models developed from the empirical analysis of existing cities, based on:
- General Patterns
- Central Place Patterns
- Textures
- Circulation
- Open Space Patterns
- Temporal Organization
Using this same 6 classifications I would like to try to identify the components of a city as an information space and then discern if it helps in understanding how cities operate and are planned today. In a sense every city is an information space, with even the City of Faith, Ecology and as a Machine relying on information space, as “the range of possible values or meanings an entity can have under the given rules and circumstances”. But what makes the City as Information Space different and unique is that it operates as an entity with information as both its means and goal. Whereas, for example in the case of the City of Faith information is used to serve the power of the elites, in the City as Information Space the currency of exchange and the commerce of the city is information. Information here is composed of flows of raw data, readings gained by scientific means, statistics and trends that are built up by massive trends and textures produced by a population that cannot individually see what it is they are contributing to, due to the limitations of perspective.
The City as Information Space is based on the idea that all agents leave a data shadow, that flows are organized in urban spaces, that information has value, and that it is an intrinsic component to the performance of identity. Individual entries attached to an individual person are not information, they are narratives, images, structures and acts that can be pinned back to individual perspective. On the basic level of interacting with a city as interconnected spaces information is generated by how people interact with the spaces. This is most obvious in the case of navigation, but it can be understood in terms of roles people are assigned (by themselves or others) within urban spaces. These roles can be identified by dress, housing, neighborhoods, language and ethnicity, social class, gender and sexuality. These fields compose the fabric of urban space in the city where heavy industry has left, and service, technology, education and research are now the dominant economic pursuits.
For the population within an city as information space, navigation brings about change, most often in the form of movement, but when it is considered in context it can result in an information-rich reading of an urban space. One example of such a reading is The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces by William H. Whyte (1988). Whyte produced a book and a film based on direct observation of what people actually do in small urban spaces: parks, plazas, square, walkways and tunnels. The film presents a remarkably engaging and informative tour of the urban landscape and looks at how it can be made more hospitable to those who live in it.
William H. Whyte: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces – The Street Corner on Vimeo.
This witty and original film is about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others don’t. Beginning at New York’s Seagram Plaza, one of the most used open areas in the city, the film proceeds to analyze why this space is so popular and how other urban oases, both in New York and elsewhere, measure up. Based on direct observation of what people actually do, the film presents a remarkably engaging and informative tour of the urban landscape and looks at how it can be made more hospitable to those who live in it.
– The most used plazas tended to have small groups of twos or threes
– The most used plazas also have, in absolute numbers the greatest number of individuals
– The number one activity is people looking at other people
– There is not much mixing between groups or between individuals within the space
– Audience spaces, display space.
– Exits, entrances, connections, corners, levels, obstacles, ledges and edges
– Choreography of the space
– The “visualization of movement is the ultimate test of a design”
– People do not stop to talk in the middle of a large space
– People tend to sit where there are places to sit
These points represent the basic structuring of information production in a small urban space. Information is only ever information by virtue of how it is defined by the social. A nice summary of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces can be found here.
Returning to Lynch’s model, I intend to perform an analysis on an urban space as a site for the production and containment of information, determined by:
- General Patterns
- Central Place Patterns
- Textures
- Circulation
- Open Space Patterns
- Temporal Organization
I hope to be able to use the information layer of a sub-environment within Stockholm to test out the viability of the City as Information Space.
David Grahame Shane, working in architecture, urban theory and design, was a guest at the Belgrade International Architecture Week (BINA 2012) and a visiting lecturer on Urban Design in the class of Assistant Professor Ivan Kucina, at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade. In an interview for BINA and Gradologija, Professor Shane talks about: teaching experiences in New York and Belgrade, influence of politics and community groups, some examples from New York, Montreal, London and Belgrade, master planning and a more flexible approach, the impact of the oil crisis, advantages of the public transportation, Thom Mayne and the importance of disequilibrium, and “a city on autopilot” and the shift of power between the cities of the world.
Re-Mixed City 