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"Between the Edges"   Milos Bobic    introduction   THOTH Publishers, 2004.

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Between the Edges

Street-building transition as urbanity interface

As it is presented in this book, an approach from the bottom up, instead of the contemporary top-down one, from some vantage point, as J. Jacobs would say, seems more suitable. In other words, instead of a hierarchical approach that follows our planning methodology, which exists for more than a half-century now, it would be more appropriate to reverse the strategy which puts individuals and the communities - city life actors - forward. Generally, this concern follows fundamental principles of the theories of L. Halprin and C. Alexander that advocate "piecemeal-growth" and "collective design", or L. Kroll's "no inhabitants, no plan" approach.

Our focus must be placed upon a keystone of urbanity, upon people and their existential space, where individual and community expression can occur. Instead of the ultimate and exclusive glorification of the city centres and the city as a totality, we should turn our concern upon the city parts, urban blocks, open-space and upon relationships in between. Although these are the essential elements of every city structure they do not exist apart from each other. Neither one block nor a street alone, nor a group of houses may generate urbanity apart from its context.

All these elements belong to the different domains, occupying particular territories under different ownership and therefore they are juxtaposed and interconnected. They are conquered by different users and different claims are laid upon them as well. The claims upon space, rights to use the space and rights of ownership are the three different and interrelated patterns that determine human behaviour in the city. They cause communication between people: visitors, users and residents, as a consequence of fighting for one's rights, that is vital for the progress of urban culture. Therefore, only people and their behavioural patterns put them in place by giving them sense. Only in that way can they function and create a complex city.

However, urbanity is not something that can be given to a community or a town. What we nowadays consider a pleasant, vibrant urban environment with a specific urban identity appears just as a final stage of a long and sometimes painful process. We often forget that conflict stands as a driving force of that process. This causality is at best explained in the words of Jonathan Raban (1983):

"Cities are communities of strangers, and strangers live with each other like members of some vast bickering family... In community as necessarily vast and diverse (...), we cannot be talked or architected into loving one another. The closer we are pushed together, the more likely we are to erupt into violence and paranoia (...) What we need most is tact and imagination, an understanding of the city as something more than an over-inhabited geographical sprawl..."

Tensions and conflicts between residents and property owners, and public space users are inevitable. There can be conflicts of different interests, claims, cultures, needs or simple human nature. But, at the same time, these conflicts are a cornerstone upon which step by step, with time, people get to know each other and homogenise as an urban community. Protagonists of the two domains - public and private - are the main actors of this confrontation. Their involvement in the conflict and the conflict itself are preconditioned by the common physical pattern of cities. All private properties in the city stand within the setting of public space. Streets create the vital communicational pattern of the city, which makes it possible to function and allows buildings to exist. Hence, private properties are dependent on public infrastructure.

At the same time, private and collective behavioural patterns are diverging and these differences are the cause of tensions and the conflicts that are innate to cities. In addition, these conflicts have caused the invention of many creative solutions, physical as well as juridical, and have led to the appearance of a variety of cultural codes. All three - clashes, solutions and codes - have their spatial representation. These spatial representations get their form through adaptation of a given spatial configuration. Through the transformation process, as well as through the incrementally grown social pattern, the spatial condition becomes better harmonised, inhabitants adjust themselves to a particular local context and vice versa, and, finally, a common behavioural pattern emerges. At that point, a conflation between people and their living environment emerges. If, in the end, the sensitive and proper balance between collective (public) and private (individual) has been met, we may say that their specific urbanity exists as well.

On the contrary, current planning processes, design principles and rules, are based upon a no-conflict doctrine which, applied in practice, delivers no-relationship spatial configurations. Private and public domains are divided by sharp boundaries, with a wide range of strategies and protective elements that have been established to prevent any disturbance between them. This phenomenon has deep roots in the history of rigid city hygienic policy, at best discussed in Dominique Laporte's book History of Shit, that led to the general spatial and cultural character of Western cities and have been galvanised in contemporary suburbia.

At this point we arrive at the major theme of this book. It is obvious that communication between public and private domains can take place only if they are able to come into contact with each other. The place of encounter is along the line where their edges meet in confrontation. The area of demarcation, where all local processes are played out, together with its content and spatial forms, is no more and no less than a battlefield of juxtaposed claims, cultures and lifestyles. But, in the end, its content and form are the result of a certain dialogue between the protagonists of both sides. Through their social and spatial interaction, including conflict, over the course of time, they are progressing towards harmony and, in the end of this long journey, a city of magical reality emerges.

However, for the adjustment of both the private and the collective domain, a certain three, if not four-dimensional room is necessary. This room, vital for social and spatial harmonisation of the community, is the realm of confrontation, where the transformation of the designed and planned according to the personal needs and overall culture can happen. All this stands as a background of our analysis of the Urbanity Interface, a space on edge, where a myriad of interactions between public and private domains are played out, shaping its development, use, meaning, spatial forms and territorial framework.

The book offers a broad overview of different situations and types of interface between public and private that can be separated, interconnected or overlapped. This is not an attempt towards romantic revival of historical forms. In fact, this is an attempt to make a breakthrough in understanding contemporary city conditions that are under the influence of three combined forces: free housing market, excessive state control and professional inertia. It gives an idea of how we may interrupt a contemporary production process for the good of urban culture.

This book suggests that the recycling of some traditional principles into the contemporary living environment may lead towards some new forms of urbanity. But, above all, this book makes a demand for more flexibility, possibility for self-expression and identity in correspondence with the present time and culture. Our special attention is concerned with principles of open urban planning and flexible regulations that enable transformation of the planned, and result in a city that breeds and lives. In our view, these are vital factors of advanced congruency between inhabitants and their urban environment, that should be seen as a precondition for the appearance and development of a specific urban culture.

The content of the book is structured in five parts. The first part, titled Urbanity Impossible, presents the contemporary condition and production system of city structure. Special attention is given to the living conditions and production of contemporary suburban developments. Besides an analysis of the market mechanism, morphogenetic process, and the role of developers, we give special attention to relationships between the professionals, with direct impact on the final form and quality of city environments. Mutual competition and conflicting goals between urban planners, traffic engineers, landscape architects and architects have an important impact on the lack of homogeneity and character of city public space.

Currently, the lack of definition for the concept of urbanity often makes discussion of the topic virtually senseless. At this point lies one of the causes for the present professional impotency in dealing with the theme. Therefore, the second part of the book, titled Urbanity Now, focuses on the phenomenon of urbanity, its concepts and problems with defining it, its conditioning agents and places where the phenomenon can be nurtured.

The third part of the book regards relationships between the city block and public space. In this part, under the title Urbanity Interface, we discuss internal structures of the two domains, private, examined within the block and house, and public which manifests itself throughout the public realm, especially street. This discussion provides a basis for the analyses of the interrelation between the two domains and their function, meaning and form in the urban context. We give special attention to the variations of the three basic spatial interrelationships of the public and private domains: attached, detached and overlapped.

In the forth part, under the title Interface Morphology, various transition configurations are considered in order to establish proper criteria for classification of the basic types of interface. Because of the complexity and multiplicity of the relationships between the house and the street, the interface has several different appearances and an endless number of forms. On the basis of their form, use, meaning, materialisation and transparency, for example, it is possible to establish a huge number of subtypes. In the end, we would face significant complexity of some of the analysed samples, evident through their multiple appearance in various typological classifications but, at the same time, it would be too difficult to establish a useful number of typological classes, that could still be mutually compared. Some very specific transition forms would even emerge as types of themselves. Therefore, the relationship between house frontage and territorial boundary has been considered as a single criteria that is applicable at all different forms of interface apart from their size, use, materialisation and scale. In the end, it appears that the more complex the configuration of interface, the higher its impact on the quality of the urban environment. And the less the divergence between the building line and territorial boundary, the greater impact on the development of urbanity.

By analysing about forty characteristic examples, seven types of interfaces have been defined in the last, fifth part, titled Interface Typology. The basic classification considers the difference between the building frontage and territorial boundary at any analysed interface form, but in addition, at every single example its psychological and visual characteristics have been analysed as well. Typological classes are about spatial frameworks that precondition development of a certain interface form while an additional overview of architectural and landscaping features presents small scale elements that can be applied within these frameworks and create various and specific interface forms.

Analyses and classification of different interface forms give an idea about their possible creative recycling and application in contemporary city building. But, as a precondition for their appearance in reality, certain necessary changes in urban planning practice and today's politics of space have been suggested that involve a more effective application of human resources toward the creation of better living environments.

Amsterdam, a city bearing a long urban history and traditions which have led to the shaping of many well-defined urban elements, has been chosen as our main field of research. Its rich heritage and urban tradition of shaping the "stoep" and different forms of "overgangszone" - both terms used for the margin between the house and the street - have developed some of the city's most vital spatial, social and cultural landmarks. Beyond Amsterdam, as the most powerful inspirational source, we also analysed and compared different forms of interfaces from New York, Milan, Paris, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Bern and Bologna. All these great and different cities provide us with examples that demonstrate, in a variety of ways, the vital interaction between public and private domain, an interaction that serves as the critical precondition by which traditional urban cultures can coexist and from which new urban cultures emerge. But, above all, this book presents, this often-ambiguous zone of demarcation as a fundamental staging ground where small territorial issues are transcended into the vital phenomenon of Urbanity.

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