Discussion

Architecture and Dispersal

To close the issue, guest-editors Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel curated a discussion with
Stan Allen, Margaret Crawford, Marcel Smets and Sarah Whiting, and put some provocative
questions to them: What constitutes public space in the contemporary city? Can the public
sphere still exist in the urban context? Should public space be fought for by architects and
urban designers? Or, as Allen proposes, is it the landscape architects alone who have been
quick to realise the potential of the empty spaces in our cities as a ripe terrain for change?

Stan Allen: I think to start with we need to be sceptical of this

vague notion of public space. Public space is a concept that is
on the one hand hardly ever defined with any degree of
specificity, and on the other never questioned as to its value.
Thats a dangerous combination. We think of the traditional
city as the locus of public space, but what do we mean? It is
worthwhile to look at the traditional city, historically, and ask
what was the notion of public space, what and where are
these public spaces, squares, markets, etc, and how are they
used? We would find that each one has a very specific and
often very different pattern. If we look specifically at the

American city, as Robert Venturi pointed out, the romantic

notion of the European piazza (as the emblematic public
urban space) is something that never really existed in the
American city. So, with full awareness that I am treading on a
sacred icon (public space is like motherhood or apple pie, it
cant be criticised), I would start by signalling my scepticism
about the concept as it is usually evoked especially in the
American context. In my view its more important to think
first about publics, in all their specificity and multiplicity, and
then look at their spatial practices.
This notion of spatial practice derives from Michel de
Certeaus, who also elaborates a distinction between space
and place. Space is an abstract notion that acquires specificity
in relation to specific practices. Place, writes de Certeau, is
practiced space. So you would almost have to ask the
question: What are the spatial practices that could activate
this abstract notion of public space? We can talk about those
spatial practices that create the potential for public places. In
the larger sense, another interesting thing about de Certeaus
views is that he has a faith in the collective creativity of
subjects, in their tendency to invent ways to use the spaces
that are given to them. You could argue that the traditional
notion of public space is a kind of top-down argument
whereby public space is given to the public. I would turn that
equation around to say: How does the collective create public
space with the spaces that are given/found?
This means that the role of the architect is to make a space
for that public to create the conditions where the public can

Paola Vigan, Landscapes of Water, Veneto, Italy, 2006

Architekt Daniel Libeskind AG, Westside, Berne, Switzerland, due for completion 2008

Many agree that the notion of the urban and public are
intertwined: that is, we cannot conceive of the urban without
a conception of public space. Yet in the current reality of
urban environments at low densities, the interdependence of
urbanity and public space as we know it can be questioned.
The concept of public space enables the architectural
profession to go beyond the sole service of the private sector,
beyond the whims and particular desires of the individual
client, and directly engage in giving shape to public life.
Architects here become interpreters of the public good
their client being the public itself, they act on behalf of the
collective interest.
Can urbanity exist without the production of public space
or vice versa? And, in parallel, can architecture as a
profession give up the role of designing for the public?

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freely exercise its collective creativity. Its for this reason that
Ive always been suspicious of the attempt to overscript the
use of public space. For me, a successful public space is
precisely a space where something unanticipated happens. So
the job of the architect becomes calibrating the right mix
between specificity, imagining and projecting potential uses
into the space, creating the right measure, understanding
flow and access, while always leaving some noise in the
system, a degree of play, that allows for the unexpected. The
architects job is to create spaces with potential. That
potential is in turn activated by the way in which the space is
put to use put into play by the public itself. There is an
important paradox that has been articulated by Michel
Foucault, who has pointed out that there are architectures
that constrain freedom and free expression, but there are no
specifically liberating architectures. Freedom, writes
Foucault, is a practice. In this sense it can be given space, but
it cannot, by definition, be dictated from above. I dont see
this as a problem for architects, but rather quite the reverse
it means that our job is not to script spatial practices, but
rather to create the precise architectural conditions where
those practices have the best chance of survival.

and administrative centres are moving away from the centre

based on a false idea of efficiency. The main square that used
to host political demonstrations is now only a place for
entertainment and tourism. The flocking together of
programmes such as sports, education, etc causes urbanity to
disappear. Collective space gets to be pre-coded if not privatised.

Marcel Smets: The classic answer would be that the church

square no longer works, since people no longer go to church.
Public space has become a telanovela, an individual yet shared
experience. In each type of urbanity, places that are shared
can be considered public spaces. Whether this is necessarily a
highly concentrated space can be questioned. Even in high
densities we see a tendency for isolation. In a certain way, we
are talking about places where we frequently spend time,
spaces that touch and connect people with other people, from
cemeteries to recreation places, sports fields, transport
locations, etc. Public space does not disappear but multiply,
it loses its hierarchy and has become more temporary, for
example in the form of events and festivals.
Cities are now concentration points in urban nebulae.
Places of gathering that used to be associated with city centres
are splintering. In Flanders, this has created a new type of city
centre where recreation is the only urban activity left. In
many Flemish towns, even civic services such as post offices

Sarah Whiting: Lament-drenched, post-lapsarian narratives

about a lost public sphere that needs to be recovered appear
to have wormed their way even into AD. These sentiments
invariably feed futile retrieve and recover missions that
share success/failure rates with other contemporary missions
based on myths. The public sphere in the US has, from its
inception, been tied as much, if not more, to business than to
its presumptive origin in government or some variant of
public organisation. As much as we may want to believe in the
altruistic alignments of public space and public agency, now
more than ever the public sphere invariably finds easier
alliances in private partnerships than it does in public policy.
Bottom Line Public Spaces (BLPS) dot the entirety of American
urbanism and are very likely the only hope for public space
that we will see in the near future. The American urban
landscape, beginning with Daniel Burnhams Chicago
Exposition of 1893, the Washington DC MacMillan Plan of
1902 (also designed by Burnham), or beginning even earlier
with the nations land surveys and acquisition policies, has
long been directed primarily by monetary concerns. While
colonial cities such as Savannah were organised so as to
create miniature cities within a city, each centred on a public
green, the incentive for cities planned after independence has
arisen from the private sector, illustrating John Lockes
observation of 1690 that: The great and chief end, therefore,
of mens uniting into commonwealths, and putting
themselves under government, is the preservation of their
property. In short, the space of the American urban landscape
urban, suburban, dense, or not utilises the delineation of
property ownership as its base map. This fact simply cannot
be avoided when discussing public space.
The privatisation of public space finds a willing
accomplice in programming in the definition,
organisation and construction of what happens in that space.

Manuel Vicente, Carlotta Bruni and Rui Leo, Nam Van Square, Macau, China, 2007

Manuel de Sol-Morales, Ville-Port, Saint-Nazaire, France, 1998

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arquitectura 911sc, New Caracol, Ecatepec, Mexico City, 2007

MUTOPIA, Mikado Plaza, restad Nord, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2005

But as the programming of contemporary life accelerates, the

programming of contemporary public space cannot keep pace.
Unlike Burnhams Grant Park of 1909, a green and sandy strip
between the city and the lake, Chicagos recent Millennium
Park is fully programmed with music, art, wildflower paths,
skating and eating. It was easier to believe that we had a
public sphere when we felt that we had time for it; now,
without that time, were seeing how small that sphere may
be. Accompanied by constant headlines such as Is your child
too busy? Make sure to schedule family fun time too, we are
fast becoming a culture with no time or space, let alone
public. The Center for Economic Policy Research, based in
Washington DC, points out that the US is the only advanced
economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers
paid vacations, and that 61 per cent of workers in the US take
less than 15 days vacation a year. If we drop the false
narrative of an original, pure, wholly public sphere and
accept that, at least in the American context, the public
sphere is always very much intertwined with the private one
and is being squeezed out of existence because of a lack of
space and time to perceive it, the ensuing questions need to be
retooled. How do we, as architects, foster new possibilities in
the public sphere, particularly in the dispersed environments
that are the focus of this issue of AD? Lamenting an absent
idealised public sphere is futile. Starting from the status quo
doesnt mean selling out: given the public sphere that weve
inherited the American BLPS here is what we need to do:

The fleeing of the public from the city, as described in this

issue of AD by Bruce Robbins reading of Thomas Pynchon on
the one hand, and Albert Popes analysis of changes in the
organisation of settlements from grid to cul-de-sac on the
other, raises questions about the relevance of previous forms
and expressions of public space to contemporary culture and
settlement patterns.
Alex Wall seems to suggest that in Southeast Asia, the
lifestyle shopping centre has the potential to become a model
of a new type of public space. More and more we see the
emerging of a wide range of collective spaces produced by a
highly advanced private market. Their design and
organisation is based on mechanisms of high profit, limited
access and high security environments.

BOTTOM LINES: Give public space a bottom line. Let it make a

profit.
MASS MARKET: Multiply, multiply, multiply. Like Ladybird
Johnsons wildflower campaign, the small aggregates to
create the large. And the large is just fine.
STACK THE DECK: If lawns and asphalt are irresponsible,
discover the new horizontal.
MAKE A PITCH: Sell the public to the public. Let them speak,
and give them a space to say it in.
KNOW YOUR MEDIUM: To know your image is to know your
public (even when it looks funny).
LOVE YOUR SKIN: Revel in surfaces. Colours, textures, patterns
these are the plinths, frames and tones of public space.

How can architects develop new models for public space

within dispersed urbanities? Can self-contained spaces with
limited access be considered public?
Margaret Crawford: There are many opportunities for
producing public spaces within existing suburban landscapes.
But, in general, architects know almost nothing about
suburban life. Trying to understand how people live, work and
interact in dispersed areas should be their first priority. They
also need to acknowledge the enormous variety of dispersed
urban conditions. In the US, suburbs can be rich or poor, close
or far from a city, with or without a centre, to name just a few
distinctions. To discuss, say, Montecito, a wealthy suburb of
Santa Barbara, California, and working-class Medford,
Massachusetts, outside of Boston as equivalent examples of
dispersed urbanism does justice to neither. Although the
diversity of suburban lives and circumstances demands
specific strategies, still, there are several obvious types of sites
that cry out for a little more public-ness. One is the ubiquitous
strip mall. Home to virtually every suburban commercial
function, from grocery stores to restaurants to local boutiques,
the strip malls current form is a bar of programme
surrounded by a sea of parking. Yet with a little tweaking it
could become a public place. Add a piazza or town green,
include some public functions (library, vehicle registration
department, city offices), a coffee shop or caf, close the bar

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Els Verbakel, Elie Derman and Ward Verbakel, Image Quality Plan, Bonheiden, Belgium, 2005

Claudia Faraone and Andrea Sarti, Waiting Spaces/Intermittent Cities, Veneto, Italy, 2004

with two wings, and rearrange the parking. Voila! a new

public/private place that would satisfy most urbanists. And
without disturbing the malls necessary commercial functions.
A beautifully designed strip mall? Why not?
Other suburban sites whose public-ness could easily be
amped up include schools (by adding functions, introducing
after-hours uses or even commercial activities), existing but
faded main streets (where, often, everyday commercial
activities like supermarkets can enliven street life), or even
monofunctional civic centres (whose lives can be extended
beyond working hours with new public and private
programmes such as theatres, sports complexes and parks).
All of these transformations should acknowledge the realities
of dispersed urbanism, such as the primacy of the automobile,
by providing sufficient parking. But at the same time
residents should also be offered alternative means of access by
creating bicycle and pedestrian paths, and even well-designed
bus stops. In dispersed areas, architects will have to give up
their dream of fixed rail transit as a generator of public
spaces. Buses are cheaper, more flexible, and with new forms
of electronic scheduling can nearly reproduce the door-to-door
capacities of private automobiles.

shared by equally minded users. This is the kind of urbanity

we should strive for, rather than the increasing cocooning of
privatised public space, a pseudo-urbanity that has been
fixed ahead of time. For example, walking in Manhattan it is
surprising how the New York University compound has
become so much more predictable than it used to be. All the
ingredients of a university campus have been provided, the
menu of a nice neighbourhood.
To a certain extent, design is always running behind the
fact, but it can also be a confrontation. Not everybody finds
the current developments that interesting; they can be
comforting yet not challenging, and in parallel there exist
microworlds that are more interesting. As designers we have
the responsibility to make people imagine and realise that
beauty can lie in very small things. The scene in the movie
American Beauty, where the camera follows a plastic bag flying
in the air, is extremely fascinating yet also very depressing.
Our perceptions have become private experiences, while the
public sphere requires the sharing of experience. As designers
we can draw attention to small, shared experiences of beauty,
unexpected, multilayered, accessible. We can work with
micro-interventions and lost spaces that function as implants,
teasing and provoking the current state of terrifying banality.
How else to operate than in the margin? Large projects are
today managed by developers who work according to the
stereotypical representations and expectancy patterns of their
users. Nevertheless, architects can challenge these
expectations and strive for a surprise effect. In the current
boredom of banality, this kind of approach is very much needed.

Marcel Smets: To turn this question around, the government

could play a more active role in increasing accessibility to
public spaces. As architect to the Flemish government, I
myself make an effort to raise awareness about making
collective spaces more accessible. On the other hand, the
Roman forum or the Greek agora were also never fully
accessible and we should be careful not to fall for a myth.
The space of infrastructure is usually accessible for all,
although not always equally. After all, the space that does
not belong to anyone is potentially the most public. The
street, the anonymous main street, rather than the
neighbourhood street, can be seen as public, where beggars
and homeless walk side by side with inhabitants and visitors.
Although there are many mechanisms that make claimed
spaces such as supermarkets more multivalent, unclaimed
space seems to offer more possibilities. In Brussels 19thcentury belt we can find examples of unclaimed space,
where a more layered collectivity can take place, not only

In several projects presented in the issue, we can identify

attempts of the urban plan to employ landscape as an active
urban force that can give meaning to otherwise loose,
neglected voids within the larger low-density environment
(for example, in projects such as the Philadelphia Urban
Voids competition, Bonheiden, Belgium, and El Caracol in
Mexico City). Research projects such as the work of Paola
Vigan and Bruno De Meulder suggest that whole geographic
regions and landscapes be read as one continuous space
layered with different systems/networks. Other projects
(such as KMar and Mikado) incorporate the landscape feature

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Vito Acconci, Mur Island, Graz, Austria, 2003

Martha Rosler, Oleanna/Utopia Station, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2003

as an integral part of the urban thinking, and experiment

with the non-built as a generative element.
Temporality and transience, traditionally attributed to
nature and ecology, have now become an important aspect of
designing public spaces in dispersed environments. Several
projects propose a non-permanent approach to design,
working with users and inhabitants (for example those by
MUTOPIA and Claudia Faraone) or provide options for future
changes (Timescape and the Urban Voids competition).

Time as much as space should be a key component of this

new discourse. As Robert Fishman has argued, life in the new
dispersed city depends on time as much as space. Thus,
adding a temporal dimension to design in the suburbs should
not be viewed as a compromise, but as an amplification of
possibilities. In the suburbs, public experiences, rather than
existing as fixed points in spaces, accumulate over the course
of the day and night, week and weekend, winter and summer.
The challenge for designers is to weave more of these public
moments into the built and unbuilt fabric of dispersed
urbanism. Again, this would require them to acquire a deeper
knowledge of the circuits and cycles that constitute suburban
lives. But I am convinced that paying close attention to the
successive events of suburban life can produce new and
unexpected ways to experience public life.

Can strategies of landscape design offer new approaches

for designing public space in environments of urban
dispersal? Is this an indispensable compromise of the
dispersed city? Can public space only exist temporarily
and then again disappear?
Marcel Smets: Both landscape and infrastructure are in the
process of acquiring new roles within the contemporary
urban condition. The flocking together of similar programmes
and activities creates a highly developed system of
connections that can receive a new meaning as public space.
Landscape, on the other hand, becomes very much related to
the question of identity. Much of the built space starts to look
similar, which makes landscape into a place of identity. At the
same time, landscape has become a place of escaping the
predefined. For example, the festival emerged as an attempt
to break out of the theatre into the landscape. A promise of
continuous change can now be found in the landscape.
Landscape offers an unclaimed territory, and therefore
possibly a new type of public space.
Margaret Crawford: Landscape architects, used to dealing
with open spaces, are clearly more adept than architects
who are obsessed with filling space, in working with
dispersed urban conditions. Landscape architects can design
parks, parking lots, subdivisions and roadsides, all staples of
the dispersed landscape. In fact, trees, gardens and green
spaces of all kinds are among the suburbs primary
attractions. This suggests that we are urgently in need of a
new discourse of landscape suburbanism.

Stan Allen: Landscape architecture or what has come to be

called landscape urbanism is an absolutely key term to
bring up when you talk about dispersed cities. The attraction
of landscape urbanism is that it offers a new set of tools to
be deployed in the design of the void spaces, the so-called
empty spaces, between buildings, roadways, infrastructure
and what has been traditionally called landscape, but is
today something beyond the mere design of gardens and
parks. These tools new ways of thinking and working are
ideally suited to this emerging dispersed field. As a
discipline, in part because of its minor status and lack of
history, landscape architecture has the potential to become a
kind of synthetic discipline that incorporates the insights of
ecology, infrastructure and urbanism landscape
architecture is situated at the point of intersection between
regional ecologies, infrastructure, open space design,
architecture and urbanism.
So landscape urbanism has already emerged as a serious
field of study: it has a 10-year history, a number of
recognised practitioners, a catalogue of projects, and its own
literature (at least two well-conceived collections have
appeared recently, for example). This is a very promising
development, and it opens up a lot of interesting territory. It
doesnt seem accidental that the rise of landscape urbanism

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Rafi Segal, Archipelago of the Negev Desert, Beer Sheva, Israel, 2007

Zvi Hecker, KMar, Schiphol International Airport, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2007

over time. This is based on a loose appeal to ideas of

ecological succession. The idea that self-organisation and
emergence are associated with lack of specificity and
lack of design is itself a misunderstanding. What an
ecologist will tell you, on the contrary, is that
emergence does not happen all by itself, in a vacuum.
Its triggered by differences and imbalances in the initial
conditions. In the urban or landscape realm, where we
are talking about artificial ecologies, you dont get
emergence without very carefully designed initial
conditions. The architects obligation to design those
initial conditions with a high degree of precision and
specificity remains.

parallels the emergence of the city as a dispersed field

condition in the late 20th century.
Recognising that attraction, I just want to point out three
areas that, for me, constitute both the areas of greatest
promise, but, paradoxically, the potential pitfalls of the
landscape urbanism approach. It is possible to identify three
key terms that have to do with the overlap and intersection
between the discourses of landscape and architecture:
Connectivity: Its no accident that there is a parallel
fascination in architecture and landscape for the
surface. Surface is the territory of landscape, and there
is an idea that the warped surface promises total
connectivity, doing away with architectures vertical
dimension, which has become associated with
partitioned space. This is of course attractive but naive.
It becomes easy to fall into a false utopia of total
connectivity, continuous flows, etc. This suggests closer
attention to breaks, discontinuities and separations
and their social/programmatic value in both landscape
and architecture.
Indeterminate programme or multi-use: Here, too, there
is this attractive idea that on an open field anything can
happen sports, festivals, demonstrations, concerts,
picnics, etc. To my mind, it is something of an
abdication of responsibility, a kind of loose thinking
where it is possible to say, Dont worry about
programme, there is no need for the architect to
determine anything, because programme take care of
itself. This approach can be seen analogous to the
notion of 1960s universal space a space, in theory,
where anything can happen, yet where, as was often the
case, nothing happens. The architects obligation to
specificity and design remains.
Emergence: In both architecture and landscape there
has been a fascination with self-organisation and
emergence, the notion that the architect supplies a kind
of infrastructure and then you just let things happen

So for me, landscape urbanism is an important emerging

field. What is interesting is that each of these areas has both
an enormous potential and some room for error. Its a young
field where things are still in flux, ideas are still being worked
out. Thats what makes it exciting. It has the potential to
change our notion of urban design by making available a new
set of tools and, above all, by foregrounding the question of
time and the question of process. To my mind these are the
real contributions of landscape urbanism. On the other hand,
it is possible to look somewhat critically on the actual
practices of landscape urbanism: most practitioners have
been doing large-scale urban parks, they havent actually
been doing urbanism. In part this is because the
institutional realm those who commission large-scale
projects have yet to catch up. Landscape urbanism is
enormously promising, but we havent yet seen the full
impact in practice. We are still waiting for projects that show
a real synthesis of landscape and urbanism. 4
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 102(l) Paolo Vigan; p 102(r)
Architekt Daniel Libeskind AG; p 103(l) Rui Leo, Carlotta Bruni and
Manuel Vicente, photo Carlotta Bruni; p 103(r) Dominique Macel, Service du
Communication de Saint Nazaire; p 104(l) Jose Castillo lea, arquitectura
911sc; p 104(r) MUTOPIA ApS; p 105(l) Els Verbakel, Elie Derman of
Derman Verbakel Architecture and Ward Verbakel Architect; p 105(r) Claudia
Faraone and Andrea Sarti; p 106(tl) Acconci Studio; p 106(tr) Martha
Rosler; p 106 (bl&br) URBAN VOIDS: grounds for change City Parks
Association of Philadelphia; p 107(l) Rafi Segal; p 107(r) Zvi Hecker

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