Linescape urbanism_The city as an object of nature
The tension between picturesque romanticism and machine-age modernism is at the heart of the English psyche, and perhaps exemplified nowhere better, more globally nor more significantly that at the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games when, to the tune of Jerusalem, the green and pleasant land of cricket and village pasture was progressively ripped up and rolled away, to be replaced with the dark satanic mills of an industrial landscape.
You may remember the chimneys and of course the forged rings of steel but do you also remember the great street map of London that was ultimately revealed with the Thames flowing through it?
It was on these streets that the rest of the opening ceremony was then staged: the swinging sixties, the tribute to the NHS and CND. And it was through these streets that the athletes eventually paraded.
Although the transition from rural idyll to urban metropolis may have been traumatic for London at times, I believe the greater message of the Opening Ceremony was that the city itself is a place of pleasure and creativity.
Now what might this have to do with the Picturesque? Well, the clue is in the map itself. Look closely and you can see that it’s made up of lines – lines of sight. It represents London as a city of glimpsed views.
And this for me is where the picturesque can be seen to take on an urban dimension. Because when London moved from a pattern of fields to a network of streets, it didn’t leave behind the picturesque; instead it created a new, urban version of the painterly, framed, composed and view-driven sensibility that has fascinated commentators on the subject.
I was taken by a line that John MacArthur used in his keynote to this seminar series, when he described a move in landscape painting from set piece compositions of great events to what he called, “Landscapes of the everyday”.
The contribution I’d like to make to today’s discussion is that the everyday-ness of rurality has a parallel, even an echo, in the everyday-ness of urbanism.
Everyday life was Bill Hillier’s fascination – why certain streets are filled with what he described as the “urban buzz” whereas others aren’t. Why so many post-war housing estates didn’t deliver the hoped-for community gatherings that their designers had intended. More than intended – illustrated in the artists’ impressions of civic togetherness with which their dreams were sold.
Why streets in historically developed cities – like La Rambla in Barcelona – are such vibrant places of human transaction.
Why these cities – such as Florence – have distinctly different patterns of spatial connectivity to what was being proposed by almost the entirety of mid/late 20th century architects and planners.
Why, despite the hardships of poverty, some unplanned settlements – created not by architects but by everyday people – are seemingly more vibrant, more convivial than planned new towns in wealthy countries.
During the 1980s, Bill and his colleagues at The Bartlett, UCL developed a method of urban analysis that breaks the network of streets in a city into discrete elements – lines – that are defined by the location and orientation of buildings and open spaces.
And which, being made up with lines of measurable length, geometrical alignment and calculable interconnectivity, allows this network – this linescape – to be read by machine code – by an algorithm – that can then determine precise topological properties of the network.
For example, which is the most connected street segment within the city or neighbourhood? And here it’s worth acknowledging that graph mathematics has numerous measures of network connectivity, such as:
- “Closeness Centrality”: which is the easiest street to get to from all the others?
- “Betweeness Centrality”: which is the street that, in travelling between each origin-destination pairing of streets, is the one that is most likely to be passed through?
Studies of actual pedestrian movement patterns – rather than the ones imagined in the artists’ impressions – show that, by combining Closeness and Betweeness, it’s possible to find robust, statistical correlations with actual flow volumes. In other words, streets that are more connected carry higher flows of people.
Oxford Street is the most connected and busiest street in London. And so on.
In the early 1990s, Bill Hillier coined the term “Natural Movement” for the 70% or so of the pedestrian flow that can be explained in any street by virtue of its spatial connectedness. Not only in London but almost everywhere on the planet where these “space syntax” studies have been made – which is now thousands of towns and cities.
And when space syntax researchers then observed the processes of people stopping in public spaces, they found that people are more likely to stop in those public spaces, and those precise parts of those public spaces, where they can see out of the space as well as around it.
In delivering the informal and intimate vibrancy of a convivial public space – in seeking the urban picturesque – then, what the researchers found is needed is less enclosure and more disclosure.
This reality jars with some designers’ interpretations of what is best for cities – of the urban picturesque of Camillo Sitte or the serial vision of Gordon Cullen. One of the most common traits of designers is to downscale lines of visibility, to over-articulate spatial networks and to over-enclose public spaces. Doing so tends to more, shorter lines of sight rather than fewer longer ones. And to isolated, underused public spaces.
Whether it be in post-war, inner-city social housing or mid/late century new towns, there has been a mathematical consistency to designers’ attempts to recreate the urban picturesque that they’ve possibly experienced on holiday in Italian hill villages.
Of course spatial connectivity isn’t the only factor that determines pedestrian flows. The pattern of land use attractions also matters. As does the location of bus, tube and other transport stops.
What space syntax researchers have found though is that, in historically evolved towns and cities, there is typically an auto-correlation between space, land use and transport. By running a spatial network model you can usually predict where the shops are going to be.
And of course this is a fundamental property of sustainability, however you define it. It also helps strangers navigate new cities.
We get a natural sense of place when things are where we expect them to be.
Less expensive food and clothes on the main shopping streets, better shops and restaurants two turns away. It’s a useful rule. Try it for yourself.
So I’d like to offer this as an element of the picturesque. That the picturesque encapsulates a sense of mental well-being. And that the correlation between spatial hierarchy, land use and transport is a fundamental means of establishing an urban picturesque.
In contrast, this relationship is typically NOT found in 20th century new towns and cities. Places such as Skelmersdale between Manchester and Liverpool. I could choose from a long list of new town candidates.
There are three main reasons why not:
- first, land uses have been zoned, separating people’s homes from shops and workplaces at low densities that make the town car-dependent
- - second, these zones have been connected by fast highways that act as spatial barriers
- - Third, further fragmentation has then been created by over-generous helpings of landscape urbanism, which of course was the consequence of planners wanting to have their cake and eat it: to create the urban but to disguise it as the rural.
The consequences have been tragic in terms of economic underperformance, car-dependence and social isolation.
So we need to be careful that we don’t repeat these mistakes in delivering the new homes and places demanded by global population growth.
And the way to do so is, I believe, with a mathematical understanding of the connected linescapes that engender the picturesque.
And one simple, unavoidable truth of great linescapes, is that you don’t see as much of the buildings as their architects might have wished. The urban picturesque may be framed by buildings but its focal points are the people in the spaces in between.
