Project for Public Spaces, which grew out of Holly’s Street Life Project and continues his work around the world, has acquired the reprint rights to Social Life, with the intent of making it available to the widest possible audience and ensuring that the Whyte family receive their fair share of Holly’s legacy.

Here is the Film  from 1988:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Jacobs had no professional training in the field of city planning, nor did she hold the title of planner. She instead relied on her observations and common sense to illustrate why certain places work, and what can be done to improve those that do not. Together with William H. Whyte, Jacobs led the way in advocating for a place-based, community-centered approach to urban planning, decades before such approaches were considered sensible.

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exert from ‘Jane Jacobs: Urban Wisdom’

When the city operates as an open system – incorporating principles of porosity of territory, narrative indeterminacy and incomplete form – it becomes democratic not in a legal sense, but as physical experience. In the past, thinking about democracy focused on issues of formal governance, today it focuses on citizenship and issues of participation. Participation is an issue that has everything to do with the physical city and its design. For example, in the ancient polis, the Athenians put the semi-circular theatre to political use; this architectural form provided good acoustics and a clear view and of speakers in debates; moreover, it made the perception of other people’s responses during debates possible. In modern times, we have no similar model of democratic space – certainly no clear imagination of an urban democratic space. John Locke defined democracy in terms of a body of laws which could be practiced anywhere. Democracy in the eyes of Thomas Jefferson was inimical to life in cities; he thought the spaces it required could be no larger than a village. His view has persisted. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, champions of democratic practices have identified them will small, local communities, face-to-face relationships. Today’s city is big, filled with migrants and ethnic diversities, in which people belong to many different kinds of community at the same time – through their work, families, consumption habits and leisure pursuits. For cities like London and New York becoming global in scale, the problem of citizen participation is how people can feel connected to others, when, necessarily, they cannot know them. Democratic space means creating a forum for these strangers to interact.
In London, a good example of how this can occur is the creation of a corridor connection between St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Tate Modern Gallery, spanned by the new Millennium Bridge. Though highly defined, the corridor is not a closed form; along both the south and north bank of the Thames it is generating regeneration of lateral buildings unrelated to its own purposes and design. And almost immediately upon opening, this corridor has stimulated informal mixings and connections among people walking the span within its confines, and has prompted an ease among strangers, which is the foundation for a truly modern sense of ‘us’. This is democratic space. The problem participation cities face today is how to create, in less ceremonial spaces, some of the same sense of relatedness among strangers. It is a problem in the design of public spaces in hospitals, in the making of urban schools, in big office complexes, in the renewal of high streets, and most particularly in the places where the work of government gets done. How can such places be opened up? How can the divide between inside and outside be bridged? How can design generate new growth? How can visual form invite engagement and identification? These are the pressing questions which urban design must address in the Urban Age.

The Democratic potential of urban space.

Porous and incomplete open spaces at the heart of cities like Johannesburg (top left) and Mexico City (top right) provide opportunities for democratic engagement. Highly designed environments like People’s Square in Shanghai (bottom left) and the open space in front of City Hall in London (bottom right) reduce the democratic potential of civic space.

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THE CLOSED SYSTEM AND THE BRITTLE CITY
The cities everyone wants to live in should be clean and safe, possess efficient public services, be supported by a dynamic economy, provide cultural stimulation, and also do their best to heal society’s divisions of race, class, and ethnicity. These are not the cities we live in. Cities fail on all these counts due to government policy, irreparable social ills, and economic forces beyond local control. The city is not its own master. Still, something has gone wrong, radically wrong, in our conception of what a city itself should be. We need to imagine just what a clean, safe, efficient, dynamic, stimulating, just city would look like concretely – we need those images to confront critically our masters with what they should be doing – and just this critical imagination of the city is weak. This weakness is a particularly modern problem: the art of designing cities declined drastically in the middle of the twentieth century. In saying this, I am propounding a paradox, for today’s planner has an arsenal of technological tools – from lighting to bridging and tunnelling to materials for buildings – which urbanists even a hundred years ago could not begin to imagine: we have more resources to use than in the past, but resources we don’t use very creatively.
This paradox can be traced to one big fault. That fault is over-determination, both of the city’s visual forms and its social functions. The technologies, which make experiment possible, have been subordinated to a regime of power that wants order and control. Urbanists, globally, anticipated the ‘control freakery’ of New Labour by a good half-century; in the grip of rigid images, precise delineations, the urban imagination lost vitality. In particular, what’s missing in modern urbanism is a sense of time – not time looking backwards nostalgically but forward-looking time, the city understood as process, its imagery changing through use, an urban imagination image formed by anticipation, friendly to surprise. A portent of the freezing of the imagination of cities appeared in Le Corbusier’s ‘Plan Voisin’ for Paris in the mid 1920s. The architect conceived of replacing a large swath of the historic centre of Paris with uniform, X shaped buildings; public life on the ground plane of the street would be eliminated; the use of all buildings would be coordinated by a single master-plan. Not only is Le Corbusier’s architecture a kind of industrial manufacture of buildings, he has in the ‘Plan Voisin’ tried to destroy just those social elements of the city which produce change in time, by eliminating unregulated life on the ground plane; people live and work, in isolation, higher up.
This dystopia became reality in various ways. The Plan’s building-type shaped public housing from Chicago to Moscow, housing estates which came to resemble warehouses for the poor. Le Corbusier’s intended destruction of vibrant street life was realised in suburban growth for the middles classes, with the replacement of high streets by mono-function shopping malls, by gated communities, by schools and hospitals built as isolated campuses. The proliferation of zoning regulations in the twentieth century is unprecedented in the history of urban design, and this proliferation of rules and bureaucratic regulations has disabled local innovation and growth, frozen the city in time.

…The emphasis on integration puts an obvious bar on experiment; as the inventor of the computer icon, John Seely Brown, once remarked: every technological advance poses at the moment of its birth a threat of disruption and dysfunction to a larger system. The same threatening exceptions occur in the urban environment, threats which modern city planning has tried to forestall by accumulating a mountain of rules defining historical, architectural, economic, and social context – ‘context’ being a polite but potent word in repressing anything that doesn’t fit in, context ensuring that nothing sticks out, offends, or challenges.

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As postmodernism faded in the 1990s, techno-utopianism came back, The rapid transformation of everyday life through technology in the 1990s and 2000s began to point again toward the prospect of technology giving rise to positive societal change. Soon, technology enthusiasts resurrected techno-utopianism, this time as a blend of the bohemianism and libertarianism prevalent in the San Francisco Bay Area with an enthusiasm for technology. Dubbed “the Californian Ideology” by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, this position suggests that new communications technologies make possible a Jeffersonian democracy of equals, freely expressing themselves and deliberating about the crucial issues of our day. If, however, the Californian Ideology promises that new technology is emancipatory, Barbrook and Cameron point out, it ignores how society is increasingly becoming polarized.[1]

Even with the collapse of the economy in the fall of 2008, few seem to expect a slowdown in technological progress. On the contrary, technology is still regarded by m any as a way past economic collapse. In stark distinction from postmodernism, technological pessimism is hard to find. To be sure the limits of the 1970s are keenly felt today—global warming, peak oil, and genetic abnormalities are all great concerns of our day—but generally speaking our hope is that innovation will rescue us. Moreover, concern about technology’s negative effects seems profoundly limited. The environmentalist movement of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s seems to now be replaced by the thoroughly commodified “green movement,” the call to action of Silent Spring replaced by a desire to shop at Whole Foods Markets.

So society draws much closer to technology under network culture than it did since modernism. In this work I want to stress the nature of the network as a sociotechnical formation. Networks are, from the start, permeated by the social, by the human need to make connections. We have been networked since the invention of language. Certainly, networks also moved forward in the mid-nineteenth century when rapid ocean and surface travel coupled with the telephone and the telegraph to produce intense changes in society and culture. To be sure, it would be possible to understand modernity from the standpoint of the network, but something else is happening now.

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Generally seeing postmodernist skepticism as healthy, a cause for optimism, Marx also raised a flag of caution: “What many postmodern theorists often propose in rejecting the old illusion of historical progress is a redescription of social reality that proves to be even more technocratic than the distorted Enlightenment ideology they reject.” That new technocratic narrative would turn to be the network, in the form of new electronic communication technologies.

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Jacques Tati’s gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in the age of technology reached their creative apex with Playtime. For this monumental achievement, a nearly three-year-long, bank-breaking production, Tati again thrust the endearingly clumsy, resolutely old-fashioned Monsieur Hulot, along with a host of other lost souls, into a bafflingly modernist Paris. With every inch of its superwide frame crammed with hilarity and inventiveness, Playtime is a lasting testament to a modern age tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion.

exert from ‘playtime‘

from ‘The postmodern city from an early modern perspective’, Robert a Schneider as a review essay to The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, edited by Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja

…Indeed, the pure phenomenology of Los Angeles emerges as one of the fundamental assumptions of this collection: the city is not so much a space as an experience, and the quintessential postmodern one at that.

…To turn from the postmodern to the early modern urban experience is to appreciate how change, novelty, endless variety, spatial fragmentation, exurban expansion, rapid social mobility, economic dislocation, massive in-migration, demographic fluctuation, widespread homelessness, the trampling of tradition, the cacophony of tongues, and the collision of cultures could characterize city life then, too.

…The salient point, however, relates to the tension between tradition and change, which characterized urban life well into the modern era. That this tension is now a thing of the past in the postmodern city—indeed, that its absence is central to the very concept of postmodernity—seems to be the overarching assumption of The City

…But just as important to their understanding of its postmodernity is its status as a true world city, whose vistas and diversity are so unprecedented as to require neologisms. The city is not merely sprawling and formless but an “exopolis,” not merely the playground for foreign capital but “glocalized,” not simply remarkably heterogeneous in its social make-up but a “heteropolis“.

…To study early modern cities, however, is to think about their multiple relationships with the world, both near and far.

…One was the relationship to the surrounding countryside

…The second crucial relationship was with other cities.

…the relationship between cities and states

…L.A. as a largely self-contained urban experience, indeed, an all-consuming one: the postmodern world in microcosm.

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from ‘Ramble city: Postmodernism and Blade Runner‘, Giuliana Bruno, 1987

…Blade Runner will be discussed as a metaphor of the postmodern condition. I wish to analyze, in particular, the representation of narrative space and temporality in Blade Runner. For this I will use two terms, pastiche and schizophrenia, in order to define and explore the two areas of investigation. The terms are borrowed and developed from Fredric Jameson’s discussion of postmodernism. In his essay, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” and in the later, expanded version, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Jameson suggests that the postmodern condition is characterized by a schizophrenic temporality and a spatial pastiche. The notion of schizophrenia which Jameson employs is that elaborated by Jacques Lacan. According to Jameson’s reading of Lacan, schizophrenia is basically a breakdown of the relationship between signifiers, linked to the failure of access to the Symbolic. With pastiche there is an effacement of key boundaries and separations, a process of erosion of distinctions. Pastiche is intended as an aesthetic of quotations pushed to the limit; it is an incorporation of forms, an imitation of dead styles deprived of any satirical impulse. Jameson’s suggestion has proved a viable working reference and a guideline in analyzing the deployment of space and time in the film. Pastiche and schizophrenia will thus act, in the economy of my argument, as what Umberto Eco calls umbrella terms, operational linguistic covers of vast and even diverse areas of concern. My discussion of postmodernism and Blade Runner will involve a consideration of questions of identity and history, of the role of simulacra and simulation, and of the relationship between postmodernism, architecture, and postindustrialism.

…The postmodern aesthetic of Blade Runner is thus the result of recycling, fusion of levels, discontinuous signifiers, explosion of boundaries, and erosion. The disconneted temporality of the replicants and the pastiche city are all an effect of a postmodern, postindustrial condition: wearing out, waste.

…Blade Runner posits questions of identity, identification, and history in postmodernism. ...The loss of history enacts a desire for historicity, an (impossible) return to it. Postmodernism, particularly in art and architecture, proclaims such a return to history as one of its goals. It is, however, the instanciation of a new form of historicity. It is an eclectic one, a historical pastiche. Pastiche is ultimately a redemption of history, which implies the transformation and reinterpretation in tension between loss and desire. It retraces history, deconstructing its order, uniqueness, specificity, and diachrony. Again, as with the photographic reconstitution, with the logic of pastiche, a simulacrum of history is established.

read the whole essay here

]]> http://interferencesystems.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/postmodernism-and-blade-runner/feed/ 0 domimariamaarten http://interferencesystems.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/the-postmodern-city/ http://interferencesystems.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/the-postmodern-city/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 01:22:33 +0000 domimariamaarten http://interferencesystems.wordpress.com/?p=56 ]]> Extract from an Open University program shown on BBC2 in the early 90s. Ed Soja discusses the postmodern nature of the Bonaventure Hotel

The Bonaventre Hotel in Los Angeles reflects the nature of the postmodern experience, literally and figuratively. It reflects the enormous growth of a postmodern downtown. (Downtown is a term primarily used in North America to refer to a city’s core or central business district, usually in a geographical, commercial, and community sense.) A new downtown for a postmodern city of corporate, local and global capital.

The internal experience of the Bonaventre Hotel, described by Fredric Jameson as a postmodern hyperspace, is characterized by fragmentation, decentrelization, dislocation, lostness, helplessness. The only recourse is to submit to social control and authority even though often invisible.

The metaphore of the postmodern city being the outside becoming the inside and the inside becoming the outside, the perifery becoming central and the centre becoming periferal.

Postmodernity is not the simple production of dysneyworlds of fantasy but it’s the production of a kind of hyperreality that is more real than reality itself. The construction of a microcosm, with tremendous attractions to it, where one can be submitted to.