It asks Public space is redolent with meaning. It is deliberately designed to encourage and discourage certain forms of interaction. We may comply with it, often unconsciously - in being compelled to perform actions - or we may co-opt space and turn it to new uses and thereby change its meaning.The city is the environment of modernity. The transformation, social upheaval and psychological change characteristic of the modern age was focused in the city. The rapid growth of cities engendered the culture of Modernism. So Modernism, as the cultural response to modernity, emerged primarily from urban spaces.
Georg Simmel's essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903) sees the city as the essence of modernity, the realm of modern experience. Simmel explored the social and psychological effects of the rise of the metropolis. The city changes too fast for us to comprehend it. This causes neuroses like agoraphobia and claustrophobia. The city harbors a nervous and feverish population often plagued with alienation and dislocation - the loss of any sense of place. Baudelaire had written that the city presented solitude among a multitude; Simmel showed that the individual's sense of isolation was compounded by the excess of sensory stimulation. To cope with the constant bombardment of visual stimuli he argued we have to become a flâneur - a stroller - and adopt a blasé attitude, or detached nonchalance. Otherwise we would become catatonic with awe:
The essence of the blasé attitude consists in the blunting of discrimination …The meaning and differing values of things … are experienced as insubstantial.
A result is that city dwellers often fail to recognize their neighbors by sight, making them appear cold and anti-social to those from rural environments. In Simmel's words "one nowhere feels as lonely and lost as in the metropolitan crowd." Simmel says that the potential alienation can be counteracted by cultivating one's uniqueness: consumerism can be used to assert individuality. This suggestion goes some way to accounting for the boom in consumerism, mass-culture, and fashion in the modern age. Subcultures like Goths, or the punks before them, use fashion and space to cultivate separate identities and ward off the feeling of anonymity that society imposes. At the same time, consumption fuels the capitalist system: society couldn't exist without it, and as a result the metropolis is perpetuated.
Simmel was writing about the Modernist city, but his ideas have become increasingly important with the shift to Post Modernity. We could argue that walkmans are an instance of the blasé attitude - they help us blank out sensory stimuli and to cultivate our individuality. We transform public space by filling it with music, like cinematic spaces experienced with a soundtrack.
I will now contrast the Modernist and Post Modernist city. Modernism tried to transform space and thus society by making it more rational. Post Modernism was a response to the failure of Modernism. It abandoned this ideal and instead permitted diversity, heterogeneity.
The Modernist City
Many Modernist architects devised "ideal" cities. This is Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation in Marseilles. His ideal was one of communal living. These monolithic blocks are raised in piloti or stilts to allow cars to pass below. This represents a segmentation of social life. Space is categorised; it produces separate zones: people live in communal blocks placed in the suburbs; they work in the city and road networks mediate between them. This closes down the possibilities for interaction and mixed use of space and can easily lead to ghettoisation. In inner cities financial districts are completely deserted at night.
The Garden City movement in Britain was antithetical to Modernism in some ways (it had more of an Arts and Crafts sensibility), but it continued Modernist zoning by separating home from work and suburb from city.
Space has a role in maintaining the social order. It is an instrument of power. Modernist planning implicitly tries to order society. But we can reshape it in turn and subject it to new uses. For example Eldon Square in Newcastle was built in the early 19th century as an elegant space and peaceful oasis. Now it is colonised by Goths.
The Pompidou Centre in Paris is an example of Post Modern architecture designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano in 1977. Built on a massive scale, it deliberately contrasts with the historic cityscape. It is seemingly indifferent to the rigid layout of streets achieved by Baron Hausmann in the nineteenth-century as part of the modernization of Paris (this turned it into the archetypal modern Metropolis). The architects intended it to be "a cross between an information-oriented, computerized Times Square and the British Museum."
It is transparent, with five floors constructed of glass and metal girders. Its innards (escalators and walkways, piping and ventilation ducts) are on the outside and color-coded: green for water, blue for air, yellow for electricity, red for elevators, grey for corridors and white for the structure itself. This seems like a parody of the Modernist edict that function should be clearly expressed. It is set in a square that provides a space for street theater etc. The plaza continues up the façade in the series of lifts and escalators in order to link the building with the surrounding space. It contains an art gallery with a pop-cultural sensibility. The design is intended to narrow the gap between art and everyday life.
