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.

Place and urban design

I recently completed an online course, Water for Liveable and Resilient Cities, offered through Monash University and in partnership with the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities (CRCWSC). With an emphasis on the consideration of water as a critical component, this MOOC presented an in-depth review of the latest thinking on sustainable urban design.

The course content helped me expand my practical understanding of urban design, a topic that has long been an interest of mine.  On another level it also got me thinking about urban geographies more generally, their realities and relevance and the peculiar set of issues that accompany those environments. In the context of this blog, the city creates some interesting possibilities too for the consideration of sense of place generally and how as a foundational concept it both supports and is defined by an urban location.

The lecturers in the Monash course spoke often of liveability as an overarching urban design goal and, along with sustainability and resilience, as one of the three core concepts driving the proper application of Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD).  A holistic approach towards what is arguably our most precious resource, WSUD proposes an urban environment, the water-sensitive city, that embraces the complete water cycle as the integrated system it truly is and employs approaches like fit for purpose water to manage a city’s resources and infrastructure in a highly efficient manner.

In a very useful sense, each of the key ideas behind WSUD was defined in the course in terms of capacity:

• Sustainability = carrying capacity, the ability to provide basic needs;
• Resilience = coping capacity, the ability to respond to and recover from future uncertainties;
• Liveability = comfort capacity, the ability to provide safety, security, well-being, a high quality of life.

When considered from the perspective of place, all three of these urban outcomes are pertinent, though I believe a strong sense of place resonates most obviously perhaps with a positive liveability experience.

And as is often the case with place, the interplay with other ideas works beneficially both ways.  A deeply felt awareness of place can certainly enhance and sustain urban liveability, whilst an affirmative experience of liveability can trigger and strengthen the urban resident’s sense of place, particularly within the context of a neighbourhood or local community.

For instance, many of the built environment features associated with a positive urban experience are classified as assets, perhaps in economic terms but also suggesting their beneficial contributions on many levels. A developed sense of place can heighten awareness of those assets, expanding the ways amenities are perceived as contributing to the city as a good place to live.  The result is an urban environment made even richer in personal meaning and experience.  Likewise the positive experience associated with those assets can lead to a deeper understanding of the urban location in which they are situated, resulting in a heightened sense of place.

It is in the nature of cities themselves and the way urban development often happens that allows for their consideration as a nexus for various elements of relevance to place.  The city is a complex tapestry of peoples, environments, conditions and ideas – like WSUD, which itself serves as a nexus, bringing together hydrologic and civil engineering, urban planning, landscape architecture, biology, geography, politics and the arts.

And as is well documented, that composite of people and conditions and ideas, all situated within the boundaries of a relatively confined location, is increasing throughout the world at a rapid pace.  More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities and that number is projected to reach seventy percent by 2050.  Combined with increased effects of global climate change, this rapidly expanding urbanisation is creating conditions whereby the goals of urban design are increasingly difficult to realise.

Of significance to place, the sustained growth in urban populations is attributable not only to the natural increase of those already living within a city, but also to the net influx of migrants relocating there from external areas.  The reasons for those relocations are varied, though often include cultural factors like conflict or natural ones like climatic pressures that make a rural subsistence untenable.

This pattern of urbanisation has been common to humankind through time, if not at the scale we see today. My own graduate research involved an analysis of the settlement patterns within what could be classified as relatively urban prehistoric settlements along the Salt River in Arizona. That proximity to consistent water was a strong draw, it is theorised, for many living in the hinterlands and exposed to the challenges of a long-term and widespread drought in the region at the time.

With sustained growth there is rapid and continuous change happening within the city boundary, involving the melting pot of varied cultures, settlement preferences, languages, architecture and so on of different groups residing in close proximity. And as urban populations increase and more people are either born into or drawn to a particular city, the challenges of managing the diversity of inhabitants and perspectives such that outcomes like improved liveability are properly and holistically realised, likewise intensify. More and more differing threads in other words threaten to make for a chaotic and dysfunctional urban fabric.

In one respect, the urban design challenges, compounded by rapid population growth and associated with a high level of complexity and diversity within the city, can be exacerbated by variable senses of place, often linked to particular neighbourhoods, and distributed across the metropolitan area.

As noted in previous blogs, that enhanced sense of neighbourhood identity, brought about and strengthened by an awareness of local place, is in itself often a very good thing, helping to bring about a stronger sense of community and feelings of inclusion amongst its residents.  The agreed vision often associated with a shared place sense is moreover an important contributing factor for the successful realisation of urban design outcomes like sustainability, resilience and liveability on the local level.

So when acknowledging place as a variable, something of a paradox results for city planners and administrators.  The unified sense of community required to get buy-in and ownership for urban design proposals within specific locational contexts can, as an element of a wider pattern of variability, simultaneously undermine the broader consensus required to enact urban design across the city in a unified way.  What works for one community might very well be utterly unacceptable when considered through the lens of the neighbouring community’s vision and sense of place.

Since a sense of place is often intertwined with a community’s identity and therefore its vision in regards to things like liveability, it could be viewed simply as one of the factors constraining a broadly agreed urban design.  But that would unfairly characterise it as something to be overcome and likewise fail to give it credit for its unique ability to transcend scale.

Place can indeed work across scales, to help acknowledge and solidify the unique contributions of specific locations to a broader perspective, while simultaneously presenting a wider level of locational awareness, at the city scale for instance, to lay across and connect those specific considerations of place-based identity into something of a unified view.

This characteristic for me brings place firmly within the theoretical camp of geography, as it should be.

Geography by its definition proposes a location-based perspective as a particularly effective way to understand how we as humans exist and have existed on our planet, and how too we might best realise that continued contract for habitation.  As it is linked inexorably to the single planet that we all share, location is an intuitive condition.  Geography is in this sense a common platform, one that can be employed effectively to establish connections, bridge gaps, facilitate meaningful communication and promote a genuinely shared vision.

As an inherently geographic concept, sense of place carries with it this capacity and is effectually utilised in situations that require collaboration and shared thinking to address a broad range of complex issues.  In the urban design and planning context, it allows for the acknowledgement of identities developed out of awareness of specific constituent locations, while simultaneously transcending them and presenting a new perspective, still location-based, for assessment.

Establishing a location-based connection with participants that is highly intuitive, this idea of place therefore offers a relatively easy means of transition across scope and scale from the vested interests of a particular urban neighbourhood to the consideration of a proposal with the potential to improve the liveability of the city as a whole.

Whilst not acknowledged and employed currently at the level of its potential, sense of place then stands as a particularly effective means of advancing the goals of urban design and improving the quality of life of an increasing proportion of those of us residing in our cities.