Gabriel Dupuy
Urban planning has, since its earliest beginnings, been obsessed with two over- arching figures: that of the center and that of density. The city center was meant to take precedence over an urban periphery considered to be of a lower value.
Density measured and regulated land use.
To what extent is the Network Society challenging those universally assim- ilated and understood perceptions?
The authors of the section “Impact of Physical Networks” suggest that the city, or rather urban society, is continuing to develop toward a high degree of differentiation and any attempt to prevent that would be futile. City centers and urban peripheries do not resemble each other; they cater to neither the same populations nor even the same activities.
It does not matter if cities become multi-centered or even if the center has become peripheral to the old town. What does make a difference is the density, with densely occupied central areas or nodes contrasting with loosely controlled suburban sprawl. Some regard such spatial differentiation as a stroke of luck, others as an unavoidable evil. Either way, it is a fact of life.
Networks once fueled utopian dreams of non-differentiated urban space, with neither centers nor peripheries. It would not matter where one was in the linear city (Arturo Soria y Mata’s largely unfulfilled utopian dream in Madrid) or in Broadacre City (Frank Lloyd Wright’s American utopia), or what floor one lived on in Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse. Networks would instantly provide everyone with the same services. What do we mean by networks? They are technical systems designed to supply residents conveniently with the services that have become crucial to modern urban life: running water, sanitation, power, transport, communications. They have come to be called
“networks” because of their spatial structure – lines, pipes, rails, and so on, either meshed or branching depending on the case.
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Those networks, however, do not have the power they are often attributed.
Nobody believes in pure technological determinism any more. Scarcely anyone still believes in Utopia. It is hard to see evidence in the transport and commu- nication networks now innervating our cities and towns of the challenge to the political and territorial hierarchies that some had been predicting. What is reflected in the widely implemented network policies is, on the contrary, evidence of the powers, the lobbies, and territorialism.
Deike Peters, referring to Peterson and Bomberg (1999), “contests a system of governance that is weakly institutionalized, resource-poor, and has no
‘government’.”
Our authors regard urbanized space as being akin to a more or less well- irrigated field growing a large variety of more or less hardy plants that are more or less useful but that ultimately, when taken together, amount to a wealth of assets. The networks, in that respect, serve as the irrigators.
Transport planners should not deny these differences and instabilities by pursuing generic accessibility improvements . . . They should capitalize on the distinctive accessibility features of different locations.”
(Luca Bertolini) That view clearly breaks with urban planning’s formerly ambitious, self- assured, and imperious past. The views presented here, on the other hand, blend a certain evolutionism in the realm of analysis with a certain humility in the field of action; although, suggest the authors, there is no longer any room for yesterday’s methods.
In the past, geometry easily distinguished the center from the peripheries.
It simplified zoning and calculations of density. Notwithstanding the aesthetic qualities of Italian Renaissance plans, as in the case of Palma Nova for instance, urban planning patterns are essentially geometrical. There are good reasons for that. Geometry serves to measure real estate. Urban planning will rely on it for as long as the right to property persists, and will continue to place its projects along land-parcel boundaries.
Nowadays, however, geometry is not so good at delimiting our differenti- ated and sprawling cities. The authors in this chapter leave no room for doubt.
Links between places are crucial to the Network Society because they represent affinities and complementarities that must be taken into account by real or vir- tual means. Today’s complex, multiplex, multipolar, and multicentered urban environment is understood in terms not so much of distances as of rhythms and connections. Distance is less of an obstacle than a missing link in the network.
New residential districts are the product of nodality as much as of concentration.
The challenge here is to move away from the essentialist, static, Euclid- ean, and object-oriented representations of space from above – that were key axioms in the formation of modern urban planning – to more
“relational” approaches.
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Commentary
All that remains is to work out how. Christopher Alexander led the way in declaring that the city was not a tree. Graph theory has enabled progress to be made in urban transport planning.
The mathematical and graphic tools . . . made it possible to understand and to design such networks, and to speak of the network city.
(Paul Drewe) But today the techniques have yet to be found and the progress still seems rather slow to us. Beneath the quest for new approaches, on the other hand, looms the question of scales. Urban planning design stemmed from a given scale of work. Yet the “networked city” referred to above combines scales in a bewildering way. I need to have a cinema near where I live, but I often watch films on television or on a DVD when I take the plane, and the Internet gives me access to programs and trailers. This example shows the superimposing of three scales – local, national, and global – and, as Melvin Webber suggested some decades ago, one must be able to handle all three at the same time.
Similarly, the role of networks is now bringing out all the ambiguity of the concept of density. Density refers to an area with a fixed, clearly marked out perimeter. If the perimeter shifts, as in the case of a city that in many people’s eyes no longer has limits, the density fluctuates in relation to the time and the space. As such, suburban areas, just because they are peripheral, do not tend to have the same density as central areas. Their networks will be less dense than in the urban core. This situation is neither abnormal nor shocking.
Nobody expects every town and village in the remote suburbs of Paris to have its own metro station. The question remains as to what is normal and what is not and why. Fractal geometry can answer that question. The fractal dimension expresses consistency in the occupation of space, according to any scale of observation. When a network is fractal in form, it serves the center and even the remotest periphery in the same way, albeit taking into account the fact that peripheries presumably cover a wider area than the urban core. As a rule, frac- tals provide a powerful tool for finding new ways of looking at the interrelationship between human beings and urban areas. It is just a matter of becoming accustomed to them and of accepting the fractal dimension’s implicit laws, which used to be obscured by the use of density: not all points in a given area are equal. This is very much how the authors brought together in this section now perceive urban areas.
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Gabriel Dupuy
Organization of
Space and Time: Challenges for Planning and Planners
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