The urban nexus

In keeping with the urban theme that’s occupied me of late, I’ve been considering just how the city exists as a fertile ground for a deeper consideration of place.  It seems to me it is indeed such a thing, no matter from which angle I approach that reflection.

A key concept emerging for me with sense of place is its inherent ability as it were, employing geographic scale, to support an individual in their unique identity while simultaneously facilitating membership within a larger landscape and broader community.  That ability to not only conjure but operate two seemingly distinct and potentially conflicting roles at the same time, and in conjunction with one another in fact, distinguishes place awareness as something genuinely worthy.

The triggers that increase awareness of place and generate meaning are variable and can themselves be associated with either highly personal, individualised experience or with the particulars of a community perspective on a given location.  What’s more and in terms of the contributions arising from the physical locations, these triggers can be distributed along the full breadth of the geographic scale put to use.

On a practical level these location-based triggers are likely to be different in an urban context than those found in a rural setting.  But at their core, and in terms of the role they play in stimulating a consideration beyond physical space to place, I think they can be considered the same.  At the most elemental level, place = location + meaning, and it is in keeping with that simple formula, no matter what the situation, that place experience will run its course.

So what then is the value of considering a particular situation?  What is it about urban environments in particular that might make them important in the fuller consideration of place awareness?  It seems to me the city is special in this regard, if for no other reason than it is fast becoming the dominant context for place experience for a majority of the world’s population.  But my sense is that there is more to it than that.

In my previous blog, I touched on the idea of the urban environment as a nexus, in particular as a location where various cultural perspectives, conditions, ideas, all come together and interact within a constrained area.  And it seems to me this quality, this facilitation of a highly heterogeneous mix of things within a particular physical not just location, but situation, lies at the heart of the city’s contribution to a meaningful comprehension of place.

With that in mind I’d like to explore the proposition of urban as nexus in a particular way, incorporating a few analytical themes with which I’ve been involved or are otherwise familiar.  To me they are relevant threads, if not those that a typical city-dweller might list if asked, within the intricate tapestry that is an urban sense of place.

And turning that around, when viewed through the urban place lens, these approaches are exposed in a new way for further scrutiny and a deeper understanding of their purpose both individually and in conjunction.  The value of geography as common platform is in this way exposed as well and can be further acknowledged as a means of helping us understand the places we live.

One such list of urban-relevant ideas therefore might include:

• Digital Earth
• The Senseable City
• Resilience

There is certainly a data-centric flavour to this list, clearly acknowledged in the first two and recognised as valuable to the last one, and that’s relevant.  Gone I think are the days when our interactions with data – its collection, discovery, management, utility – are considered as distinct in and of themselves.  Data engagement is no longer a technical “other,” the exclusive purview of the highly trained and specialised practitioner, as it was when I began my career.  Ironically technology itself, and its ability to capture, manage, analyse and present voluminous amounts of data in a timely manner has relegated the once unapproachable to the status of intuitive.

This is a profound development in many ways as it reduces or otherwise eliminates barriers to our interaction with data.  Suddenly as a result the playing field is opened up to a scope we could hardly imagine as practical not so long ago.  That creates seemingly endless possibilities of investigation, of knowledge, of understanding.  But of course therein lies a novel and maybe even more daunting challenge: How to manage and what to do with that newfound freedom?  Such are the questions addressed as part of the discussions around big data.

The three place-relevant themes listed above are all affected by this shift in how we interact with data.  Some of course are no less than defined by it or exist because of it.  Whilst they each might insert themselves at different spots along that data-interaction spectrum, they are all leveraging the new approach to data in some way.  And they are doing so, in most cases, within an urban context.

Digital Earth: With a goal of creating a global-scale digital model of the earth, incorporating all of its natural and constructed systems, this initiative is clearly ambitious.  But it has effectively leveraged developments in technology to make real strides of late.

In terms of generating actual working models, initial focus has been on the urban areas of our planet, with efforts on several fronts to develop fully virtual cities.  The idea is that these then could be linked to effectively generate a networked virtual representation of the whole planet.  Sitting behind these developments is the increasing awareness that we simply need this modelling capability to properly manage, in those locations that affect most of us, the big problems like climate change.

I believe a key point for acceptance and the success of the Digital Earth (DE) approach involves a re-alignment of our thinking about what it truly offers.  To date the focus has been on the highly technical aspects of this proposal.  That’s understandable as the early-stage requirements of developing and maintaining a full virtual model on the scale of a single city even are daunting.  But such an emphasis masks the true value of DE, which is demonstrating how a computer-generated representation of our environment, even one operating at a global scale, can in fact support a more personal and nuanced interaction for each of us with our local environment.

Once effectively modeled as part of DE, a virtual city is available as an intuitive resource to help us to explore a myriad of ways to engage with our urban contexts, our neighbourhoods, our street.  These might be improved or otherwise altered ways of looking at common levels of engagement, or they might be new ways of engaging altogether.  The potential at least exists for this virtual representation to engender a more holistic and therefore more potentially genuine view of our city, which can only help colour and enrich our sense of urban place.

The Senseable City: Based at the MIT SENSEable City Lab and led by visionaries like its Director, Carlo Ratti, this initiative draws from both practical advances in sensor and data collection technologies and conceptual foundations including the city as a living organism, to propose an important contribution to the broader goals of DE.

Acknowledging that both the natural and built environments in which we all operate every day are profoundly complex, Senseable City proponents suggest an approach to understanding that incorporates continuous and live streams of data from a host of strategic sensors throughout the urban environment.  These collectors might be stationary or mobile, the latter including the well-publicised Copenhagen Wheel, which leverages bicycle commuters to collect real-time data on a host of urban variables such as traffic, air quality or road conditions.

As the streams of data from many sensors are received and processed, we are able to generate a true picture of the urban environment around us.  And importantly we can watch it evolve in real time, in response to various stimuli or agents of change.  Our contextual awareness is heightened as a result and we find ourselves interacting in new and more personal ways with what might previously have been considered a lifeless infrastructure and built environment.  In this way the Senseable City approach contributes to the DE value proposition of technology as an enhancer of environmental engagement.  And it too then provides a positive level of complexity that might very well evoke or amplify our sense of urban place.

Resilience: Along with sustainability and liveability, resilience is a fundamental driver for many applications of urban design and as such it is a significant consideration for much of the world’s population.  I noted in a previous post that it can be understood as something of a coping capacity, a measure of how a city – both its built infrastructure and population – responds to and recovers from future uncertainties.  Whilst not limited to natural disasters, that’s often the context in which resilience is discussed and it’s one that has interesting ramifications in regards to consideration of place.

In simple terms, a disaster can be characterised as disruption.  It is a disruptive force in many ways, from physical breaks to utility and communication services, the loss of transportation networks, the profound shift from familiar and comfortable routines to a focus on survival and subsistence, and the forfeiture of an expected level of personal safety and security.  Not only is what was once there and taken for granted gone or irreparably damaged, there exists for the survivor of such a disaster no guarantee that it will persist into the future.

And it is the nature of that return path to a sense of normalcy, either in the immediate aftermath once response efforts are initiated or well into the lengthy timeframes of recovery, that is itself a measure of resilience.  Following a destructive event, particularly in an urban setting where significant populations and dense implementations of the built environment are the norm, the ability to rebound, to put things right again, and to limit that which must be sacrificed to loss, is paramount to the continued life of a city. And if the time is taken to do so, the thinking about what persists, albeit sometimes in an altered form, and what is expendable, influences the level of resilience that is built into mitigation efforts.

To return disrupted lives to something of their condition prior to a disaster requires awareness, not only of what that desired state looks like, but of the current state and where it falls in relation to the desired outcome.  It is in this regard that data generated from technology can be of particular value, historically characterising the city in the past, providing an accurate assessment of current conditions and thereby facilitating meaningful comparisons, pre and post disaster.  It is also at this stage of course where access to such data can be severely constrained.

As those in a city recovering from a disaster make their way in their disrupted lives, it is memory ultimately that steers them towards the familiar and to an urban existence exhibiting a high level of liveability.  Place awareness has a vital role to play in this regard and can exist as an important aid in recovery and therefore an invaluable component of resilience.  A strong sense of place, shaping awareness of the urban environment prior to a disaster, is available as a well-needed guide for the individual struggling to return their lives to some level of normalcy and for the community rebuilding its damaged infrastructure and amenities.

A strong sense of place can indeed persist through the events of a natural disaster and help speed the journey of recovery.  But it can be disrupted itself, perhaps in the case where physical location triggers are so irreparably damaged or lost such that they can no longer facilitate the meaningful awareness they once did.  In that case place awareness may be lost altogether, with profound consequences on the future individual or community.  Or it may re-emerge as something altered, a new awareness of a place changed by disaster, exhibiting new influences and playing a new role in resilience.

All three of these themes – Digital Earth, the Senseable City, resilience – associated with the urban context, reliant on large volumes of data, are more than just analytical approaches.  They are ultimately attempts to better understand exactly what a city is, how it functions, how it affects and is affected by those who reside or work within its boundaries.  And behind all of those considerations, I would suggest, lies awareness.  Awareness as city-dwellers of our immediate contexts, of the locations on the urban platform where we spend time or which are otherwise important to us.

I’m not suggesting that something as esoteric as sense of place can be fully realised from a stream of technology-derived inputs of environmental data.  I’m suggesting simply that we need to be open to such inputs and consider how they can help fill out and enrich our otherwise experiential awareness of place.  To relegate technology in this way to the realm of the impersonal or negate it as operating, as with DE, at a scale too broad to be of relevance to an individual engaging with their immediate surroundings, is in the end to do ourselves a great disservice.

And it is in the urban context, at least currently, where these technology-driven data inputs are most fully realised.  It is that context too, the constrained and complex mix of conditions and outputs and circumstances, where they have the potential to provide the most value.  It is where the technologies themselves, or the initiatives like senseable cities or a fully digital earth that they support, likewise come together to interact and generate potentially new ways of considering the city around us.

It is for me an awareness of place, mapped onto the urban environment, that is ultimately at play here.  And with its myriad of elements, each influencing our place awareness in different ways, some in conjunction, some in contradiction, the city helps tease out just what place means to each of us, both as individuals and as members of a community.  As a nexus for these influences, the urban context therefore serves as a particularly valuable landscape for defining sense of place.

Community and place

Place, the awareness of it, is multi-scalar.

While it is typically experienced as something highly personal, emergent within the consciousness of an individual, it is also recognised at wider-reaching levels like those associated with community.

The reasons behind this broader-scale acknowledgement, as with those associated with individual awareness of place, are varied. But what can distinguish place at this particular scale is its deliberate use. Place often springs upon an individual without warning, without conscious effort. Whereas in the context of community it can in fact be used intentionally, as a tool, to promote an agenda, to provide a political voice or to give life and significance to a plan.

In this circumstance, the sense of place is captured and put to work. The wild sense is domesticated, or at least an attempt is made.

And that’s not a bad thing. A tangible sense of place can in fact serve as a critical component in the definition of a community. It can bring members of that geographic group together in a way that significantly strengthens their idea of community and gives meaning to their definition of community. It can serve as that common ground, in this case shared perception, that links them uniquely and supports the idea of a collective voice. It can provide them membership in the true sense of the word.

Place is, in this instance, an individual and potentially very personal awareness distributed amongst a group. And it’s a particularly powerful link, a bond that creates a strong foundation upon which other aspects of community can be explored, built and realised.

That shared sense of place can embrace within it the otherwise disenfranchised and help bring them into the fold. It can motivate and serve as a call to participation amongst those who might otherwise operate in isolation, assuming their sense of place was singular and of no particular interest to others. It can draw them into the group of community, in a natural way, bound by the significance of and connection to a particular location. And once part of the community, the sense of place they share with others can help establish and support them as genuine contributors.

This simultaneous spanning of experiential scales from the highly personal and individualistic to the expanded boundaries of a broader group and community exists as a profound characteristic of place. It is quite amazing really and in my opinion speaks to its significance.

And this particular quality of place does not go unrecognised. I’ve seen numerous examples where communities have leveraged a sense of place, used its shared experience and awareness to strengthen the bonds amongst, and therefore the unified voice of, a group of residents, to create and bolster a geographic identity.

By way of example, I live in the Thorndon neighbourhood of Wellington. When I moved here four years ago, I was aware of the existence of such a neighbourhood, knew its approximate boundaries or at least its topological positioning on the map of Wellington neighbourhoods and possessed the odd fact that it was for instance the birthplace of one of New Zealand’s most celebrated writers, Katherine Mansfield. But my knowledge of it beyond that, on the level of anything like community awareness, was absent.

In those intervening years I have been struck by just how powerful is the sense of community amongst Thorndon residents and though I may not have previously articulated it as such, just how effectively the shared sense of place here is employed to strengthen and grow that community identity.

Though fairly small, Thorndon boasts more than one active residents association, producing on a fairly regular schedule outputs like newsletters while also convening community meetings. I’ve read those newsletters and have attended a couple of those resident association meetings, all the while surprised at the level of passion with which this community, really its unique and shared sense of place, is considered and held. I leaned a good deal about the history of this neighbourhood and that it was inhabited by many whose roots here ran deep.

And I learned that some who actively participate in these resident groups, the community leaders I would call them (though they may not embrace that title themselves), have been quite deliberate and vocal in their use of place to communicate and promote a local agenda to the broader political structure of the city of Wellington, within which they are situated and must necessarily operate.

Some of the interactions between neighbourhood and city could be characterised as contentious, as for instance the ongoing push against Wellington City Council to revisit its zoning guidelines which, some local voices claim, is currently facilitating a gradual and destructive spread of commercial properties. The cost they explain is a diminished residential tone to the neighbourhood. This they consider an undermining of the character of Thorndon, a commercial gentrification of sorts, as it introduces the detrimental effects of increased traffic and displaces the unique to Wellington and place-defining residential architecture of this area.

Yet in the midst of this rather quarrelsome interaction there has emerged a community improvement project, financed and implemented by the city I assume, which clearly demonstrates common ground. Whilst it may not directly address the spread of commercial properties, it most definitely recognises and speaks to a locally generated sense of place identity. Interestingly, it interjects that proclamation of identity, based on an acknowledgement of unique historical roots, right into the location at the heart of the commercialisation debate.

It is a sense of place that has unmistakably been employed here and which serves as a common means with which to span, on some level at least, the differing geographies and associated political perspectives of the city of Wellington and one of its neighbourhoods. This role as common platform for shared thinking is a hallmark of location-based approaches to problem solving and highlights that peculiar power of geography woven within the idea of place.

The project area in question is commonly described as Tinakori Village. I’m not aware that name represents anything official – I’ve not seen it reflected consistently on maps – but it is most certainly accepted and in common use, amongst the locals if no one else. That in itself is an interesting idea, the use of location names and relationships to sense of place, worth exploring at another time.

Tinakori Village is a commercial zone, running as a straight line along either side of the neighbourhood’s primary thoroughfare, Tinakori Road, and representing the setting for most of the retail activity in the immediate area. These businesses consist primarily of antique shops, art galleries, pubs and restaurants, and spa or wellness facilities. So certainly what some would consider upscale establishments and not necessarily the type of places one would feel compelled to visit every day. Yet I’ve found that the area is consistently well visited, with foot traffic as well as the expected vehicular traffic plying the main transportation artery between heavily populated neighbourhoods to the north and west, and downtown Wellington.

Some months ago, heralded by construction warning signs that sprouted at either end of Tinakori Village, the city embarked on a significant improvement project in the area, which resulted primarily in the upgrading of footpaths and kerbs along several local streets. The steady drone of construction equipment and activities became a characteristic of the neighbourhood during this time. When it was completed, the improvements to the stretch of Tinakori Road footpaths within the Village emerged as the centrepiece of this work.

Beyond the upgrades to the footpath paving and kerbs within Tinakori Village, there were other improvements as well, including the addition of benches and significantly, strips of stone pavers inscribed with quotes from historical and noteworthy residents of Thorndon. These inscriptions were a unique addition to the project and clearly meant to highlight the contributions of local historical figures, their settings of white stone contrasting sharply with the black of the newly paved footpaths surrounding them.

The quotes that now grace the ground underfoot in Tinakori Village are sourced from a mix of creative Thorndon residents, including but not limited to writers and painters and composers. A complete list was recently published and promoted in one of the resident association newsletters, providing not only a handy reference but also an endorsement and recognition of the level of support and agreement between the neighbourhood and the city. This acknowledgement is based on a shared sense of place.

The creative individuals behind the quotes represent a widely ranging collection of professions, interests, experiences and perspectives, but they share in this case a common bond of residence. They share a connection on some level with this place, this community called Thorndon. And it is that bond that links them now, not only to the physical footpaths in the Tinakori Village but also to one another, though their lives might have run their respective courses in wholly separate worlds.

And flipping that around, their quotes, snippets of thoughts from a far-ranging group of former residents, reinforce a specific and localised sense of place for those less notable currently residing in the neighbourhood, as well as those from the outside, shopping or otherwise passing through. That expression of place might trigger a curiosity in those passers-by to know more, while it feeds a level of pride amongst the local residents and sparks a genuine desire to share who they are, to convey the unique history in which their present manifestations have been forged.

This sense of place then is at once a creator, definer and promoter of specific identity, while also a powerful means of connection and communication with others. In this way it serves humanity on a profound level.

Such is the power and significance of place, spanning across time, across geography, to inspire not only the individual and their highly personal levels of awareness but also the broader community and the reflection of its identity – both as a reinforcement to itself and as a proclamation to the world outside itself.