Constructing metropolitan landscapes of actuality and potentiality

Constructing metropolitan landscapes of actuality and potentiality

Read, S.
Bruyns, G.
Van den Hoogen, E.
Plomp, M.

Architecture and The Built Environment

Urbanism

2007-06-12

The Flat City space syntax model (Read, 2005), has been developed to extend the functionality of the space syntax method into the ‘periphery’ (the metropolitan) of the contemporary metropolitan city, and to provide a method for describing and evaluating the form of contemporary urban landscapes. The Flat City model proposes that the environment is structured into strata of ‘place-regions’, each with their own definitive scales and each with their own connective matrix enabling the ‘regional’ movement which realizes places. A detailed empirical study of spatial centrality as revealed by the distribution of street-edge commercial functions in the metropolitan territory around Amsterdam, is presented and evaluated in the terms of this model in another paper (Bruyns and Read, 2007). The results of this research suggest that actual physical urbanization or the emergence of settlement form, does not simply follow connectivity, but depends very often for the precise location and character of its emergence, on a factor of ‘grounding’ within place-region strata at lower scale-levels. This implies immediately a critique of current connectivity-led urban development practices in the Netherlands and a brief critique is developed here in relation to two recent urban development plans. The results also begin to suggest a different mechanism of the transfer of economic and social potential from networks to urban place. This mechanism of transfer has been broadly understood in terms of technologies of connectivity and their simple imbuing of pre-existing places with higher-scaled potentiality – and, for example, Saskia Sassen evaluates a number of global city places in terms of ‘connectivity indices’ (Sassen, 2006). Our results suggest a strong interdependence between matrices of connectivity at different scale levels, and that the potentials of connectivity emerge out of scaled layers of connectivity considered right down to the matrices of the street grid of the urban fabric. But this also means we can develop a clearer understanding of the relationship between the global, the metropolitan and the local. These terms do not imply any dualistic opposition, as in global-local – rather the properties of the global and the metropolitan become incorporated in the local in a capture of the potentials of larger ‘worlds’ within smaller, and a realization or materialization of these potentials in the smaller. This implies a monadology of, for example, Leibnitz or Whitehead, more than a straightforward network spatiality of connectivity. This paper will continue to develop this notion as a possible way to understand urban spatialities, by suggesting possible ways of understanding the potentialities of real local fabrics as ‘worlds of incorporation’.

urban morphology
movement layers
Amsterdam region
infrastructure
design

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:135737dc-5aa3-4c9f-8498-c7763eb0badd

Proceedings of the 6th Space Syntax Symposium (6SSS), Istanbul, Turkiye, June 12-15, 2007

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2007 The Authors