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Chopping the Townscape

City planning policy should reflect the item it takes in concern. It has an immeasurable importance on regional and city levels, taking responsibility for general development of the city and for social, functional, spatial and infrastructural framework of its totality and individual parts. But, on a smaller scale, for the real prospect of democratisation of this process, all concerned parties should be involved and should find their own desires matched and realised. However, it is difficult, if not impossible, to reach this goal in today's circumstances, concerning the scale of urbanisation, people's mobility and market mechanisms. Idealisation of the democratic principle will not be of any help. Mobile society cannot guaranty a stabile social profile of the communities. Cities are economically, spatially and socially in permanent flux. Therefore, any urban plan seems to be imperfect.

Politics and investors are conditioning the development strategy but they are only a small part of the big picture behind city building. Particular 'politics of space' creates a basic framework within which all decisions and acts of urban planners, architects and developers must fit. But, certain disciplines within the design process itself have different ideas and follow different doctrines. They are also parties in the market and therefore hold their share of responsibility for the contemporary lack of urbanity as well. Their ideology and work principles are reflected in the whole heritage of modern urban tradition. The idealists' belief that life can be perfectly organised through spatial planning and design is still the basic notion of the professionals. This notion is at best presented through urban planning that is still considered as a blueprint for the creation of spatial monuments.

The general urban planning policy is to preserve planned developments as constructed, until the moment when they do not function or no longer satisfy standards. Although we have learned that the future of human settlements cannot be precisely foreseen, urban planning doctrine is still based on fixed visions, average needs, empirically based processes and norms. Therefore, because the differences between planned vision and the city's real life will and must occur, tensions within community will grow equivalent to the scale of this gap. To a certain degree, people usually find they way to create some balance with their environment. But, in an extreme situation, this development can take negative direction reaching a level of decline, pauperisation or alienation. If the urban planning and spatial patterns - in short: urban control and state paternalism - are rigidly exercised, the chance for such a development comes closer.

Such a trend is highly dependent on professional bureaucrats and the professionals who design and maintain cities. In city development, urban planning and design practice, architecture and city landscaping are two main, but at the same time separate, disciplines without the necessary structural integration. Their common goal - a better and liveable city, could bring them together, but their particular professional tasks, goals and responsibilities are different. Also, their professional background often comes as a cause for misunderstanding, unproductive competition, and the potential for conflicts of interest. The general distribution of tasks and responsibilities follows territorial division. The division between public and private territories is caused by ownership, their juridical conditions and overall status. But, this separation also hinders collaboration between designers and engineers involved in city development and, as a consequence, extrapolation of the city spatial structure. Architects are designing inside territorial boundaries of individual lots and considering the problem from the private domain towards the public. On the contrary, landscape architects are preoccupied with the public domain and their concern should be directed from the respective public point of view. Besides these, a significant difference lies in the perception of space itself. Architects are preoccupied with volumes and, thus, have a three-dimensional vision of space while landscape architects are facing a void, and therefore preoccupied with the design of two-dimensional surfaces. In the last instance, it seems as a logical and rational division of responsibilities in the course of city design. However, in the scope of quality and coherency of the public space it seems less reasonable on several points.

First, public space cannot be considered as a two-dimensional surface. In the two-dimensional approach, focus is on the city floor whose aesthetic and quality depend on functional organisation, materials, detailing, colours and textures. However, city space is more than that. It is a three-dimensional construct and its rooms have a preconditioning role in people's impressions and behaviour. Therefore, in addition to the organisation of traffic and configuration of the physical aspects of street space such as height and character of the buildings, the proportion of the street corridor and character of the division between buildings and the street are superimposed over the entire system. Those are aspects of the three dimensional space and any other approach has little to do with the nature of the problem and the aim of the task.

Second, some critics take the position that in today's practice an open conflict exists between architects and landscape architects. Urban sociologist A. Reijndorp went even further than others by suggesting that nowadays tension between architects and landscape architects has its roots in the year 1982, from the international competition for Park la Villete in Paris. From that moment, architects and urban designers, who won all the main prizes, are under counter attack of landscape architects. Landscape architects took the strategy "on that and about that", and from that moment architects are facing exclusion from tasks considered as landscape architecture. Thus, new townscape design turns out to be two-dimensional.

The opposed understandings of the character of open space by architects and landscape architects is at best presented through Turner's critique of the wining plan for Parc la Villete, designed by Bernard Tschumi. According to Turner, Tschumi's design had been deeply inspired by the idea of philosopher Jacques Derrida that, as in language, the deep structures lie beneath the surface. Therefore, the truth lies under the surface. For the purpose of discovering it, man must deconstruct the hierarchical relationship between the structural elements of the object. But, there are also other understandings of where the truth is hidden. Where? On the surface, answers Caneti. From another point of view, the depth of the layers analysed seems irrelevant. What comes first - natural or built layers; what are the criteria for their evaluation; and how different layers are related? - those are the questions that could be asked by the analysts. And answers to these questions are highly dependent on the analyst's profession. Criteria that are valid for architects are not the ones of landscape architects. As Turner believes, this plan became one of the first examples of poststructuralist design. He also expresses scepticism over Tschumi's idea that architecture can entertain relations with cinema, philosophy and psychoanalysis, stressing that Tschumi is interested 'mainly in geometrical layers, not landscape layers'. Finally, 'in the Park that has been made, every living thing is there for the glorification of man. It is a high-tech, high-energy landscape. And the land ethic has been disregarded'. Whatever the 'land ethic' may be, it is a naturalistic ideal of man, not a kind of nature. It merely reflects another unique point of view conspicuously absent from today's reality. In that case, what is the problem, one may ask?

Third, in the course of this competition, so-called progressive landscape architects proclaim new extravagant concepts. In their vision, new environments should not necessarily correspond with human nature and needs because man is able to adapt himself in all different situations and contexts. As A. Geuze pointed out, people can assimilate all sorts of environments and through mutual adaptation of the people and the environment they always come to balance. This is a simple logic, but still some questions remain: where does the limit of human adaptation lie and in which way and under what circumstances and speed does the built environment become adapted? Beside the questionable strategy of transforming the built environment under today's regulations and planning system, a specific danger of this vision is related to the new role of public space as a representative of the wishful image of society. It is a pretentious image most of the time and, thus, in the historical sense familiar to the cities, but still doubtful because it has nothing to do with common life and culture. Today it is designed much more as a surreal art object than human environment, and it has nothing to do with the space as a mirror of society. Or, maybe, we got it wrong. It may be that present society does not want to be mirrored. An art object stands as a billboard that covers urban reality. The effects of this concern may be seen in the transformation of the cities' public space into segregated and rationalised environments.

Since 1998, for example, the Amsterdammtjes, those familiar steel anti-parking posts have been removed and replaced by high granite curbs. Posts that, besides having an obvious positive impact on function and safety of the narrow canal streets, also play an exceptional role in 'ritual activities that bond community whether of normal routines of daily life or periodic festivities'. People domesticate them in ingenious ways that enhance the semantic value of their townscape. From the early '70s until now it became a city toponym of itself spread around the world by visitors. Now, with a new canal/street profile the streetscape is no longer the stage on which public life plays out, but a show-room of pure emptiness.

However, with respect to the 'building diversity' approach to new developments, open space, apart from its typical role, has a special mission: to provide spatial unity throughout the neighbourhood. The differences in housing types and forms, which have nothing to do with place or style, but much to do with the artistic idea of its designer, are loosing any common visual relationship. Uniform and simple open-space design is the glue, which should pull various building forms together.

In the view of M. Clawson, besides its communicational function, open city-space has the following six main roles:

1. It provides light and air to buildings
2. Provides perspective and vistas of the urban setting
3. Provides recreation in the broadest sense of the term
4. Provides ecological protection
5. Serves as a city-forming device
6. Reserves presently vacant areas for one or more uses in the future

Tunnard and Pushkarev consider only four of these roles valid to the streets: productive, protective, ornamental and recreational. Basically, both definitions consider only spatial and functional aspects of the streets.

But, apart from the roles mentioned, the main function of streets is productive, providing corridors for the ample flow of goods and people. In practice, traffic engineers have the most direct influence on the form and character of roads but, in addition, their decisions influence the form and character of public space in general. The traffic has priority and must be properly organised without causing danger to other users of public space, pedestrians in particular. For these reasons, the responsibility of traffic engineers is to organise roads and streets according to safety regulations, and traffic speed criteria. Their role is inevitable but often yields an unanticipated damaging influence on the visual quality of public space. Sometimes expensive, ambitiously designed public space can be, after all, over-saturated with traffic signs, information boards and other necessary traffic equipment. Their location and form most often do not correspond with the spatial context due to their following of traffic, rather than, aesthetic norms.

Usually, in the end, traffic equipment overwhelms sophisticated public space design, materials and details. The disaster could be prevented if not for two recurring problems. First, traffic engineers most often are not involved in the design of public space as equal partners in the 'creative process'. Second, every traffic regime is temporary and changes more often than open space arrangements. In this case, as well as the first, misunderstanding the role of public space, Rappoport's warning that the organisation of meaning can be separated from the organisation of space, makes its grim appearance in reality.

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