Streets and squares — oppression or liberation?
This is a reading response for the course Urban Desgin Theory given by David Monteyne at the University of Calgary.
The main theme throughout the readings for me was the significance and the divergent interpretation of open streets and squares as public spaces. It was particularly interesting to read how Baudelaire (as discussed by Berman [4]) sees Paris’ boulevards as a place where people of different classes would eventually come together again, whereas Engels understood Manchester’s thoroughfares as a “hypocritical plan” to hide the misery and poverty present in workers’ districts [1]. What troubled me reading this, is that his description of how Manchester is structured along class divisions, still applies to most cities of the world. People living in gated/suburban communities and those living in poorer neighbourhoods are not really bumping into each other on great common boulevards—instead, they probably stand bumper to bumper separated by steel, glass, fumes and noise.
It is also interesting to see how the different lifestyles over time and culture may lead to completely different types of streets and city layouts. The Gies’ describe the streets of the medieval town Troyes based on need and everyday practice: streets are often named after the trades that were located therein [3]. While the cities of British America four centuries later also heavily relied on trade, the naming and layout of the streets show the rejection of the dense European city in favour the ‘green country town’ with Oake and Pine Streets laid out after a rather spacious grid (Girouard [5]). To me it was striking how British and French city planning tended to favour open streets and squares for leisurely strolling (mostly by the privileged), as evidenced in Calcutta’s esplanade, Paris’ boulevards, and Williamsburg’s main street, whereas the Spanish plazas in Latin America must have been planned rather for churches, markets, and celebrations (Girouard [5])—possibly oriented more towards common/communal needs of city inhabitants. Ironically, the wide open streets of British America turned out to be particularly practical for motorist traffic, so that the envisioned seeing and being seen happens less during strolling through cityscapes, but during the rush hours of car traffic.
When reading about how cities and spaces have been designed and restructured by ‘great’ thinkers and doers, such as Michelangelo with Capitoline Hill in Rome [2] and Haussmann with the boulevards in Paris [4], I wondered who really was part of the planning process and—maybe more importantly—who should it be in the future. Bacon mentions the ‘principle of the 2nd man’ and thus alludes to a process of many actors throughout the planning process of urban space. I would argue that planning, changing, improving neighbourhoods should be a much more interactive and participatory process. After all, city planners and architects may not live in the spaces they create and envision. We have seen many provocative works that certainly contributed to artsy and intellectual discourse, but what about the people actually living in such urban spaces? Should they have a say? How could this ‘say’ be transformed into practical participatory planning? I could imagine that a more inclusive approach towards planning could also be a catalyst for community building. Wouldn’t people relate more to each other, if the built environment has been conceived and created together in a collaborative process? I would assume that shared experiences relating both people and built artefacts may better support a richer social fabric in contrast to the often anonymous relations in our cities.
[1] F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, ch. The Great Towns. 1845.
[2] E. N. Bacon, “Upsurge of the renaissance,” Design of Cities, pp. 9–16, 1967. From The Urban Design Reader (Routledge, 2007).
[3] J. and F. Gies, Life in a Medieval City. Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1969. Chapter “Troyes: 1250″ (23-33) and “A Medieval Housewife” (46-52).
[4] M. Berman, “”the family of eyes” and “the mire of the macadam”,” All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, 1982. From The Urban Design Reader (Routledge, 2007).
[5] M. Girouard, Cities and People, ch. 11 The City as Export. Yale University Press, 1985.
