We’ve been given a venue in which we can test some of the thoughts and theories we’ve been developing. The site is the recently bui lt Drake Circus shopping center in Plymouth city, UK.
Drake circus is a large shopping center on the east side of the city center. 48 Clone-town shops in one conglemerate block. The center is entirely introverted. The shops are arranged so that the shop fronts all face inwards. The center is surrounded by 4 or 6 lane roads which is pretty inhospitable to people. Drake Circus decides to reinforce the inhumane and unfriendly spaces surrounding the place by the (mainly ugly) architecture and the length of unbroken and inpenetrable walls that surround the place. The threshold is mainly 4 or 5 stories tall of sheer wall. From the outside it is a fortress.
The sparse entrances into and out of the center make the threshold impervious in all but 3 highly controlled and monitored points. The security make their presence felt to a greater or lesser degree depending on whether they like the look of you. In fact, if you’re bored, or you just detest being treated like a criminal it’s a good laugh to dress up in your roughest clothes and walk around acting dodgy. The space is highly controlled, even taking photo’s is prohibited and had me and my colleagues removed from the building! The place has a thin pretense of being a public space but the smallest scratch of the surface and it is very much private, owned and intolerant.
The space inside is inhospitable in other ways as well. The place is busy and crowded. The surfaces are cold and hard, Glass, polished concrete, marble tiles and metal that all add up to create an acoutic nightmare of din and noise. Everyone is rushing because the place is so unpleasant to be in, there is no quiet places, or places to sit and be still. The only places to sit is in one of the cafe/ fast food outlets where you’re obliged to buy more stuff. Shelter in the street space is so lacking that you see people pressed up against the walls so that they can stand still for a few moments and not get in the way of everyone else rushing through. The environment that has been created is inhospitable, they don’t want you to hang around, it isn’t there to enrich the city or it’s inhabitants. They want your money. Then they want you to f*ck off.
This space is the product of retail capatalism and the financial perogotive it ultimately leads to. After the building first opened it won the Carbuncle Cup for Crimes Against Architecture, A little later it won 2 prizes for ‘retail’, ie. it’s shocking architecutre and urban planning but it makes money. This building was not a failure it was a gfreat success, it does exaclty what it wa designed to do. The failure was that the local council failed to protect the interests of Plymouth City and the businesses and residents within it. This space is the product of political and business wranglings.
South entrance
Just when you thought Plymouth had had enough of concrete.
The smaller world brought about by transport and communication infrastructure has increased the division of labour. It is now economically sane to manufacture a car in 11 different countries using raw materials from another 9 countries and sell the car all around the world.
Émile Durkheim saw the increasing division of labour in the 1890’s and was scared of the rapidly changing world. He predicted a social disorder he called Anomie. Whereby the impersonal, individualistic and mechanistic workings of the post industrial revolution society would lead to confusion and abandonment of social norms and the self regulating controls of a society.
Perhaps anomie has increased somewhat since Durkheim’s time. A lot of society is less personal now, there are less opportunities for casual interaction with people in the community. The infrastructure we have has taken away the routines of rural community life that once acted as community glue. We no longer have to collect water from the village well, it arrives straight into our homes. Fuel for heating is the same. Waste is automatically carried out. Food is collected once a week from the supermarket where it is such an automated and efficient process there is no time for casual banter with the staff, and the chance of seeing your friends and neighbours is small due to the scale of the operation. Casual encounter is disappearing and although purposeful encounter is increasing it is often through phones and email. Whatever the advantages it is a poor alternative to face to face. The world has become increasingly connected, increasingly efficient and increasingly impersonal. When you are meeting someone over some kind of long distance communication you loose some sense of place, you are no longer as firmly rooted in your own environment. You have joined some kind of third place, a ‘non space’. Or a non spatial place.
Perhaps this is something that needs addressing. How do we reconcile the new world of virtual space within a more humane framework?
One option is to recreate the real world online. Perhaps position the intangible arrangement of online spaces within a spatial framework that we are used to… A replication of the spatial language we are used to in daily life. After all we have an innate sense of the qualities of space, and we have learnt the cultural norms that are embedded within the environments around us. The school and the home have different meanings, systems of operation and rules of behaviour contained within the walls and rooms that define them. What if we used the cultural meaning of different spatial environment to define the meaning and expectations on behaviour on different social places online?
Even if it was possible to position online social groups within a spatial framework would it be desirable? The direction and beauty of the internet is the mashing and mixing of content and the interconnectedness of these different places. Physical space is not supportive of these qualities, a primary function of architecture is privacy and security. The contents of a room are only available to the selected who are allowed within it, even within a public space you can only access it if you are sharing the same space with it, at the time it is available. The web is generally free of time restrictions, but in terms of access it is gated and barricaded no less than any other part of the built environment. It is only the public zone of the internet that creates the utopian notion of freedom of information for all.
As an elementary visulaisation of a social structure we can plot a diagram of who is in contact with who, and from the frequency of contact, who is close to who.
This diagram has added temporaral decay, an assumption that connections between people fade over time. The real world is alot more complex than that but it illustrates the current events in the play well.
Looking at the two graphs we can see that the ‘container’ for an environment effects the form of the social network that results.
This is a social network for a web based onlne community. The discrete nature of the forum allows ‘lurkers’. People who observe the discussions going on but do not contribute themselves, Almost as if they were witnesses to a broadcast medium like TV or Radio.
You can think of it as a ratio. D/T.
As a pedestrian, 1Meter=1Second.
In a car, 20M=1S.
Improvements in transport technology and infrastructure have increased the distance/time ratio. 1/1, 5/1, 20/1, 1000/1 etc as we move into planes and satellites. The successor of transport is information communication technology. If we consider information as an entity that traverses a distance then the ratio increases to infinity. Fibre optics transmit information at the speed of light, Quantuum antanglement theoretically allows instantaneous transmission.
Instantaneous transmission means that distance is collapsed. One end of a line is connected to the other end without seemingly traversing the distance in between.
Social-space and physical-space are seperated.
So, what is a social space without street corners, supermarket queues, bus stops, pubs? What happens to the social environment when it is removed from the physical ‘stage’ of streets, buildings and rooms?
I’ve been looking at ‘No Sense of Place’ by Joshua Meyrowitz. A fantastic and well written book on the effects that new forms of media have in shaping our perception of places and the relationship between all sorts of different people in a society.
“a television is like a new doorway to the home and through it rush many welcome and unwelcome visitors. Television and its visitors take children across the globe before parents give them permission to cross the street.” (Meyrowitz 1995)
Meyrowitz proposes that electronic media has an amalgamating effect on places and culture. It seperates the physical spaces we inhabit; the school, the home, the workplace, from the people we meet and the social activities that can take place.
Before telephone, radio, tv and the internet, you could only talk with someone if you shared the same space, control money by visiting the bank, do shopping by entering a shop etc. These activities no longer have a ‘place’ in which they occur.
If you wanted to see a politican you would have to visit him at some venue making a speech and even then you would probably only see him at a distance, Now they are broadcast into our homes at larger than life sizes. Despite being recorded, transmitted and recreated we still claim to have ‘seen’ the person or event that is playing on our screens. It doesn’t matter if it happened 4000 miles away or even if it happened 4 days ago, it is recreated for us here and now. What is happening anywhere in the world can be happening wherever we are. “Yet when we are everywhere, we are in no place in particular” – Meyrowitz
“Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than “a place for everything and everything in it’s place”“ – Marshall McLuhan
We measure the physical distances we travel in our lives in terms of time. I live in a flat on the second floor, out of my window I can see the little shed where the washing machine is kept. It’s about 8 meters away from me. However, to get to it I need to walk out the door of my flat, down the communcal stairs, out the door of the front of the building, along the street, into the back yard and finally into the shed. About 60 meters perhaps. But… I have to get my shoes on, put on something warm, find my keys. In space, the washing machine is 8 meters away from me, in terms of the time it is inconveniantly distant!
Likewise, there’s a supermarket 18km from our house and another one 9 km from us. The one further away from us is down the motorway, the closer one is through town. The distant supermarket is geographically further away and chronologically closer.
Our mental maps of the spaces we inhabit and the locations we visit are created by the amount of time thay are seperated from each other by. And the time of day that we inhabit them.
I would like to explore these time-scapes more fully.
What would a map adjusted to show ‘nearness’ in chronological rather than spatial dimensions look like?
What does it tell us about space in differing environments, urban and rural, or countries with differing levels of transport capability.
Metropolitan or ‘Gateway’ towns such as London, Hong Kong or Panoma. These are highly connected places. In terms of ‘nearness’ the world’s shape is changing. A new order of spaces has emerged.
“Intraurban digital networking furthers the long evolution of human settlements from loose collections of more or less independent dwellings to highly integrated, networked cities in which multiple infrastructures of tracks, pipes and wires deliver centrally supplied infrastructure to buildings and caryy away waste.”
- Mitchell William J. (1999). e-topia. Massachhusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. MA. London, England.
E-topia concerns the shift of spaces from real to virtual. Town halls, markets, food sources, shops… New meeting places are online. Youtube, yahoo groups and so on are the social nodes of the future.
Mitchell views information communication technology as a leveling force, a force for good, equalising the world and breaking down barriers, walls, prejudice between culture. Uniting and unifying people. Expansion of political partys; EU, Nato, IMF, World Bank etc.
- “Good roads and canals will shorten the distances, facilitate commercial and personal intercourse, and unite, by a still more intimate community of interests, the most remote quarters of the United States. No other single operation, with the power of Government, can more effectively tend to strengthen and perpetuate that Union which secures external independence, domestic peace and internal liberty.” –
(Albert Gallatin, Secretary to the US Treasury, 1808, quoted in Perry, 1995, 1)
Space and time are inseperable. In scientific understanding this is estabalished, in our human understanding it is something that lies not far beneath the surface. Whether we are aware of the time/space relationship or not, it defines our lives.
The long term trend of human technological development has provided us with ever increasing mobility for ourselves, and our ‘things’. ‘Things’ being material goods, food, water, energy. But also meaning information, data, media and ideas.
This is most obvious in the more developed areas of the world but to a lesser degree nearly all inhabitants on the globe will have felt the effects communication and transport advances around the globe. And if it hasn’t had an impact on your world then it will.
Illustration 1: Travel times in America in 1830 and 1857. During the introduction of a public railway network.
- Graham S and Marvin S (2001). Splintering Urbanism. Routledge, London.
It’s great for multi-media. Cross references web sources and integrates with the web. Cross references articles. Makes information available to others.
Con’s.
The setup is designed for diary’s which means you get a very linear and sequential path of thoughts. Ideas need to branch and flow, spread and converge.
There’s an opening in the online market for a flexible workbook / blog capable of tying up all the elements in a non chronological sequence. No design process is strictly sequential. Lets have more flexibilty.
The internet is a multi-dimensional space. It isn’t limited by the capabilities that paper has so why do we recreate the limitations of paper in virtual environments?
Have a look at this demo app from the PaperVision3D SDK. This is much better. It’s messier, tactile, flexible.
My old web hosts finally realised that I hadn’t actually paid them for two years and pulled my old site. The hosts were called DTS-NET. They were rubbish, Avoid them. They advertised “99.9% uptime” but what they meant to advertise was “75% uptime if you’re lucky”. Anyway, I cancelled payments to them but they failed to remove my site and my access so I got free, if a little crappy, webhosting. This is the silver lining to badly run businesses.
So anyway, here’s a web log to document the progress of IDAT306, The Production of Space. A module in the Architectural Design and Digital Media degree I’m studying at Plymouth university.
The module addresses historical and contemporary developments in our understanding of space as a cultural, social and technological phenomenon as new media practices alter traditional models for architecture, communities and personal identities.
