RECOMBINANT URBANISM David Grahame Shane
BO O K
RE V I E W
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I N T R O D U C T I O N…. Recombinant Urbanism by David Graham Shane, who teaches urban design at Columbia University, isa book of wide-ranging erudition. Thisbook mainly focuses on the historyand theory of city design. There isa particularly strong analysisof Kevin Lynch showing his many moral and political commitments and the multifaceted character of hiswork — ranging from the nature of hisstudies, particularly those on which hisclassicbook, The Image of the City (1960) wasbased. Hisprogram for those who would design new citiesor intervene in existing citiesis founded on three conceptshe callsarmature, enclave, and heterotopia. Citiesare a combination of armatures, or communication and transportation networks usually streets. These streetsconnect enclaves which he defines as public squares or other central but single-purpose assemblage spaces. Shane offers a rich catalogue of possibilitiesfor thinking about these elements. The third element heterotopia, which for him isany large and complex monument or public institution “standing out” from the urban fabric. He gives as examples a hospital or a “monumental church”. Shane comments that “over the years, many studentshave asked mewhy I place somuchemphasison heterotopias”. “Top down” planning is excoriated by Shane, and he criticizes the Modernist tendency towardssuch planning. He believesthat that Kevin Lynch, who iscelebrated in thisbook,had a compelling vision of participation. . In fact, one of the strengthsof the book isthat it showshow deeplyLynch believed in the capacity of ordinary people to shape their environment.
Thisbook re-examinesthe way in which urban actorsrecombine elements in order to create conceptual models of the city at various scales. Urban actors work as catalysts in the city and depend on conceptual models to guide them, whether they act asarchitect, urban designer, or landscape or city designer. A city model enables a designer to construct an understanding of the city and its component elements; facilitating design decisions. It orients urban actors in complex situations and at multiple scales. Urban theorists have identified various normative city models that act as stabilizing patterns for large urban systems over time. The advantage of these modelsisthat they combine a system of normative idealsof what the city should be like with simple organizational structuresand clear methods of implementation. Further, each model tendsto represent a stage of urban development. The three stages associated with the three modelsare often termed asthe pre –industrial, industrial and post industrial. In ‘A Theory of Good City Form’ (1981), Kevin Lynch described hisown influential triad of models, the City of Faith, the City asa Machine, and the City as an Organism. Standard urban history texts such as Spiro Kostof’s‘The City Shaped” (1991) site these three models.
CHAPTER 1 Focuses on the ‘City Theory’ of Kevin Lynch, outlining his attempt to provide a trio of city models that would take into account not only the static structure of the city but also its transient and utopian aspects. Lynch criticized his contemporaries for their short sited attention to city fragments, total control, and the urban design of local settings based on functional and economic considerations. The chapter concludes by tracing Lynch’s influence on variouscontemporary designers who emphasize ‘city design’ as a large scale, systemic process, such as the Landscape Urbanist Movement.
CHAPTER 2
Outline the object of Lynch’s unflattering remarks, the theory of urban design. Thistheory waslinked to the design of shopping malls. He studied malls and participated in major changes that were taking place in the adaptive reuse of traditional city centres. It describes His ‘Image of the City’ (1960) and work on downtown Boston (1958-1959) contributed to these changes. Shows how m the Deconstructivist designers of the 1980s and 1990s altered city design codesto produce their novel recombination. Shane emphasizes the armature’s as a linear organizing device in urban design (organizing the vertical section of the city or sky scraper) and the role of the heterotopiasin enabling experimentation.
CENTRAL BOSTON URBAN DESIGN
ENCLAVES AND ARMATURES
CHAPTER 3
This chapter examinesthe armature and enclave in detail, describing their combinatorial operation in different city models and urban design fragments. The chapter concludes with the examples of various combinations of armatures and enclaves, ancient, modern and contemporary.
CHAPTER 4
This chapter examines heterotopias as places of change in more detail, looking at different strategies for combining and recombining urban elementsin plan or section at various scales. Shane stresses on the altered situation of the post-modern city and the role of heterotopiasin stabilizing the three great normative city modelsthat constitute Lynch’sgreat gift to city designersand urban designers.
CONCLUSION It is the argument of this book that cities are necessarily built around a variety of patches or enclaves that are interconnected by ecology of armatures, transportation and communication networks set in the landscape and crucially complicated by a wide variety of embedded heterotopias. Heterotopias are primarily places of urban change, accommodating exceptional activitiesand persons. The first type, the heterotopiasof crisis, hides agents of change within the standard building types of the city, masking their catalytic activity. The second, Foucault’s heterotopias of deviance, comprises institutions that foster change in highly controlled environments. In these small packets of highly disciplined order, relationshipsbetween members of society are organizationally restructured to facilitate the emergence of a new order that may transform society. Examples include universities, clinics, hospitals, courthouses, prisons, barracks, boarding schools, colonial towns, and factories. Here people are gathered, sorted and manipulated and eventually exported by stable public organizationsthat provide institutional and cultural continuity. The third category heteroptopic change fostering place comprisesrealmsof apparent chaos and creative, imaginative freedom. In heterotopias of illusion change is concentrated and accelerated. Such placesinclude formal and informal institutional markets, bazaars, shopping arcades, department stores, malls, stock exchanges, hotels, casinos, cinemas, spa, gym, etc.
This book’s view of the urbanization process is that the novel, unstable, shifting processesdeveloped in heterotopic placesof change can transform each of the three dominant, normative city models from one to another. Such transformations have occurred throughout history and continue to occur all around us.
