The ‘Inter’ Condition of Urban Design
Different materials, structures, infrastructures, cultures, policies and potentials constitute a city. ‘Difference’ is a city’s form. However, ‘difference’ can be more than a static collection of things based on binary pairs or variations on a model. In reality difference is also differentiation or the ability for something, someone or some place to become different from itself. Any identity, place or even concept is composed of an aggregate of forces and precisely because they are not given entities, recomposition is more than possible. Any identity, place or concept being in contact with another identity, place or concept will contract forces from that identity, place or concept to restructure its composition. Differing interrelations between things allows for the differentiation within a thing. Recomposition is also the process of differentiation.[1]
A city is an event of differentiation. Differences within a city are never just based on countable differences. As such, if the city has a consistency it is this ‘inter’ condition or inter-relation amongst things that spurs differentiation. How should urban design intimately deal with this ‘inter’ condition? One may suggest it is to act accordingly to the city’s reality. Urban design does not just design a city’s ‘inter’ condition but immanently express this ‘inter’ condition in its own practice. It involves incorporating the spatial, visual and conceptual forces of other disciplines. The disciplinary boundaries of analysis, planning, policy-making, physical design and inhabitation are blurred; the sequence in which one act follows another is constantly changing. With urban design interdisciplinarity exists not just amongst the design disciplines but includes the non-design disciplines and the voices and bodies of the city. Conventional hierarchies and workflows are challenged here.
The ‘inter’ condition allows for an exchange of forces. In terms of rethinking Vancouver’s housing development by way of this ‘inter’ condition it is never whether the artists, designers, politicians, activist-groups or theorists are more correct in diagnosing the state of affairs. Questions pertaining to what forces each participant can extract from other participants and use toward his/her own rethinking should be considered instead. A constant feature of any interdisciplinary practice is that no one discipline’s principles and methods are unproblematically superior. Although, this being said one may still suggest that one discipline may have more to offer for a particular project or a particular part of a project. The keyword is appropriateness and not superiority that resorts to moral claims.
To gauge the appropriateness of a discipline is to find out what sorts of forces constitute that discipline, and knowing what forces to extract from that discipline in order to combine them with other forces from another discipline to produce effects. The bringing together of philosophy and urban design is a commonly used interdisciplinary act. Traditionally, philosophy, because it deals with concepts, is viewed to be anterior to design. A designed place is treated as an example of a certain philosophy that has been distilled into a single concept. However, this binary and hierarchy of concept versus example can be challenged by Michel Foucault’s understanding of philosophy’s function.
A city is an event of differentiation. Differences within a city are never just based on countable differences. As such, if the city has a consistency it is this ‘inter’ condition or inter-relation amongst things that spurs differentiation. How should urban design intimately deal with this ‘inter’ condition? One may suggest it is to act accordingly to the city’s reality. Urban design does not just design a city’s ‘inter’ condition but immanently express this ‘inter’ condition in its own practice. It involves incorporating the spatial, visual and conceptual forces of other disciplines. The disciplinary boundaries of analysis, planning, policy-making, physical design and inhabitation are blurred; the sequence in which one act follows another is constantly changing. With urban design interdisciplinarity exists not just amongst the design disciplines but includes the non-design disciplines and the voices and bodies of the city. Conventional hierarchies and workflows are challenged here.
The ‘inter’ condition allows for an exchange of forces. In terms of rethinking Vancouver’s housing development by way of this ‘inter’ condition it is never whether the artists, designers, politicians, activist-groups or theorists are more correct in diagnosing the state of affairs. Questions pertaining to what forces each participant can extract from other participants and use toward his/her own rethinking should be considered instead. A constant feature of any interdisciplinary practice is that no one discipline’s principles and methods are unproblematically superior. Although, this being said one may still suggest that one discipline may have more to offer for a particular project or a particular part of a project. The keyword is appropriateness and not superiority that resorts to moral claims.
To gauge the appropriateness of a discipline is to find out what sorts of forces constitute that discipline, and knowing what forces to extract from that discipline in order to combine them with other forces from another discipline to produce effects. The bringing together of philosophy and urban design is a commonly used interdisciplinary act. Traditionally, philosophy, because it deals with concepts, is viewed to be anterior to design. A designed place is treated as an example of a certain philosophy that has been distilled into a single concept. However, this binary and hierarchy of concept versus example can be challenged by Michel Foucault’s understanding of philosophy’s function.
Foucault’s works deliberately refuse to prescribe what society must be, despite his political ambitions. His works eschew utopia. So, where is the fit between Foucault and urban design, for having no vision is inconsistent with the term ‘plan’ which conventionally emphasises devising the right means and outcomes. Addressing this charge Foucault points out that society itself (one may infer the city) does not operate upon a defined set of means, more importantly society’s ‘final’ image is unimageable. The means and outcomes must be produced not by plans drafted in isolation but via actual events and engagements. Foucault writes,
The actions that follow an engagement with Foucault’s work arise from a “situated action”. A situated action is not just an application of a theory to a posterior example; philosophy holds no superiority here.[5] A designer picks out certain conceptual forces from philosophy in order to combine with those spatial and conceptual forces s/he is already acquainted with from his/her practice. A designer must use Foucault’s works in reality, in actual design-situations. Only through actual usages do new actions and designed-forms emerge. In the actuality of a design-situation one may also encounter other lines of thought, some running smoothly alongside Foucault’s, so breaking Foucault’s apart. Moreover, sometimes the practice of design may force us to rethink the arguments within certain theories. For example, communicating with a neighbourhood’s citizens may reveal unusual power relations that contributes to this neighbourhood’s uniqueness, thus a new theory of spatial planning may be required to understand and ultimately sustain this uniqueness. A strictly Foucauldian mode of approaching power relations for this neighbourhood may not be fully adequate; other lines of thought may be drawn in. Foucault may have to be read alongside Heidegger, indigenous concepts of space as well as the musings of Douglas Coupland. A situated action of design occasions an event of invention and differentiation. Disciplines are interwoven into each other. Within this complex actual design-situation it is not just new places and identities that may emerge, new ways to write spatial planning theory may emerge.
An actual design-situation for urban design involves more than what occurs in a studio. It involves working with actual peoples, places and shifting networks of concepts. Thus, Flyvberg and Richardson suggest that urban design should pay attention to ‘realrationality” rather than normative rationality. They suggest a move away from ideal situations. Designers can shift focus away from ‘what should be done’ and make a “reorientation toward ‘what is actually done’ – towards verita effectuale”.[6] We pay attention to new voices that are emerging in actuality. We decipher what forces constitute these voices and most importantly design new strategies to engage with these voices and forces. These voices cannot be generalised. Thus, when working with a community we have to sincerely ask: Are we trying to make that community see a designer’s point of view, or, are we together with that community designing a new point of view which possibly is yet expressible according to normative categories of place and identity. In an interdisciplinary practice it is less a matter of designing-for and more a designing-with. Designing-with expresses that ‘inter’ condition discussed earlier.
Within an interdisciplinary approach our conventional modes of analysis and disciplinary knowledge are broken don when we encounter unfamiliar groups of forces. When we are designing-with others it is often harder to image an absolute outcome. As Foucault suggests, we often ‘no longer know what to do’ when this mingling happens. However, this not-knowing can be an interesting departure point. In not-knowing we seek out new modes of thinking and acting, we start to communicate with others in new ways to gather information and build new criteria to decipher these information. In not-knowing we begin to build new conceptual and eventually practical frameworks instead of reiterating old frameworks that are colonial in expression.
What can designers learn from painters, and vice versa? How can the acts of painting and installation become mingled with acts of site analysis, typological studies and streetscape drawings, and how will this mingling change the current conceptions of place and subjectivity imagined by urban designers?
Most importantly, we may ask how our existing approaches to design and design thinking are challenged when we hear fellow participants speak in actuality. What new lines of thinking about place and subjectivities are being generated in this actuality that can seem even frightful? The speed at which forces can collide within the actuality of an interdisciplinary design-situation spur us to experiment with thinking and acting on subjectivities and places in ways the comfortable pace of a normative and isolated ideal situation does not foster. We ask: What new places and subjectivities can arise from this not-knowing?
Making Potential Communities
The means to carry out designs of a city are continually changing. We already conduct a variety of exercises to ensure this continuity; the post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is one obvious example. There is a distinction between maintaining this continuity for the sake of achieving an ideal city/citizenry and maintaining this continuity to promote the constant differentiation of place and subjectivity. How a POE is drafted and analysed is important if a city’s complexity is to be sustained. The data gathered from a POE if it is to be put into various redesign acts must again involve the community at hand. The community should be brought into new series of actual design-situations. Critical spatial and social planning reminds us the POE is done not just to see whether urban designers have done a good enough job, but to provide data – voices and forces – that allows for the design of a community in transformation.
Communities are made, unmade and remade. The form and identity of a community is always coming. The “coming community” for philosopher Giorgio Agamben is characterised by a “whatever being”. For Agamben, this “whatever” is tied to what a singularity which is not so much an unchanging entity but a singularity in the sense of something that is ready to become something else. The “whatever being” is thus a being that possesses great potentials.[7]
An important thing to remember about potentiality according to Agamben is that potentiality is never divorced from actuality. While the word ‘potential’ generally denotes something that is set in the future, Agamben locates potentialities in the actual present. Additionally, Agamebn suggest that potentiality is more than something one can predict, it can also be that which is unimageable (unrepresentable). He elaborates, every thought also “exists as a potential not to think,” and every word or sentence written is also the potential not to write.[8] What is written is inclusive of what is yet to be written. However, what is yet to be written does not designate only the opposite of what has already been written, in other words something imageable. Potentiality for Agamben includes something truly unqualifiable and unquantifiable at present but nonetheless is in the present. He surmises:
Agamben’s notions of potentiality can be further elaborated through Jean-Luc Nancy’s formulation on writing: “Writing [is] that which does not respond to any model whatsoever of the appropriation of significations, that which opens at once relation and, along with relation, significance itself.” The “message” of this kind of writing is not a “signified”; it is not even a plurality of relativised signifiers, but what Nancy calls “the toward.”[10] What writing offers is the intensive move towards something that cannot be mapped out in advance. What writing signifies is the potentiality of the multiple ways a text can be engaged with. For example, the kind of actions and thoughts that may emerge from engaging with Foucault’s writings is innumerable. Thus, writing is not about locking down the world in textual representation and making prescriptions. Nancy suggests, writing that expresses this “toward” tend forth to a community that resists its own hypostasis.[11] This asymmetrical relationship between writing and action expresses the more profound unimageable potentiality that Agamben speaks of.
Agamben and Nancy’s understanding of actuality to harbour potentiality mainly regards literature and philosophic writings. However, this approach to the unity of actuality and potentiality can be expressed in urban and community design. To design neighbourhoods for a community is not to lock people and place into one identity. To design is to gather new groupings of socio-historical, economical, artistic, textual, spatial, conceptual and cultural forces that may express subjectivities and spatialities yet to come. Urban designers are not fates. In other words, the actuality of a design practice expresses the potential of potentialities and new actualities. It is this point about actuality that connects back to earlier discussions on Foucault’s stress on situated-actions instead of ideal environments for the understanding and making of societies.
In designing a coming community the whole traditional scheme of signification, the equivalence between subjectivity and object, concept and object is challenged.[12] This is especially true when dealing with Vancouver, a field of criss-crossing local and international forces. There will never be a designed building or site that can unproblematically represent a coming Vancouver. Homi Bhabha writes that “identikit political idealism” ignores the reality of history-making which always threatens binary and sequential historiography. The political object of a transformative community is “neither the one nor the other, [it] properly alienates out political expectations.”[13]
So what are the actual signs of a community that alienates out political expectations? Nigel Thrift, in consideration of a vitalist urban life, suggests “temporary articulations of creating/inventing,” which can spur actions and outcomes that destabilise the urban and social fabric in order to reform new modes of being. And, this process of actualising and de-actualising to occasion new potentials perpetually renews itself.[14] Thus, when considering a vital Vancouver identikit buildings and neighbourhoods representing identikit political idealism are of little value. The vital is not something merely postulated but that which is acting. It can be experimentations with physical design conducted together by designers, the citizens and the City Hall. Beyond simple civil disobedience there can be experimentations with physical design conducted together by designers, the citizens and City Hall. Here, micro-zones or temporary re-zones may be outcomes.
In a vitalist city zones are in reality changing their function. The physical designs originally designated by a zoning code can be acted upon differently: Parks built to beautify and pacify a neighbourhood may be used by activists. Service lanes may become outdoor venues for art exhibitions. Neighbourhood cornershops and butcheries as much as three blocks from main arterials become galleries. Houses within residential zones may become gallery spaces where future generations of urban designers may gather. Temporary and permanent structures facilitating explorations on social relations and modes of living are built in backyards. A community’s sense of place and identity is constantly reproduced in its varying engagement with the city’s physical design.
All the abovementioned usages of the physical environment are heterotopias. Places like these are at once inside proper city zones and outside of these zones.[15] The capability of having multiple places exist within a physical boundary is partly made possible by its use that defies alignment with traditional observance of time. As we have seen a house can function as a residence and a gallery at different times. But, this temporal quality of heterotopias is expressed not just through the defiance of traditional observance of work-time. While places designed with utopic visions in mind tend toward the eternal, heterotopias “are absolutely temporal.”[16] What is built may be temporary; they allow new forces in and out of their assemblage hence allowing different futures to potentially emerge.
To sustain vitality a designer recognises his/her physical design as merely providing spatial, material, infrastructural forces to a city or neighbourhood, how these forces are used can be rather open. An asymmetry exists between a community’s subjectivity and the physical design of a neighbourhood. A physical design is an actuality that provides the conditions for the emergence of potentialities.
Community, as Agamben writes, is an infinite series of modal oscillations between actuality and potentiality. The politics of a coming community is no longer a duel between the State and the people. It is no longer setting up communities that are diametric opposites of the State. To do so still abides by the spatial, subjectival and economical zonings desired by conventional and colonial modes of planning. Rather, a coming community’s political object and identity oscillates between what it actually is presently and what it is becoming (its potentialities).[17] More importantly this will to transformation is embodied by the city leaders as well. In a coming-Vancouver our policy-makers will weave the city’s complex forces into their epistemology and methodology. In a coming-Vancouver policy-makers, designers and citizens recognise that within any master plan drawn there are maps and zones yet drawn, and from these potential maps and zones yet-defined subjectivities and places exist.
Worthy life
Potentialities are hopes for changes that may be greater than the designated futures we are too used to. On the subject of hope and society, Baruch Spinoza writes,
For a free multitude is guided more by hope than fear; a conquered one, more by fear than hope: inasmuch as the former aims at making use of life, the latter but at escaping death. The former, I say, aims at living for its own ends, the latter if forced to belong to the conqueror; and so we say that this is enslaved, but that free.[18]
Spinoza’s free multitude, a society guided by multiplicity and change, is that which attends to the living of life, recognising that life is expressed by change rather than by static being. Drawing from Spinoza’s understanding of life, Deleuze writes,
Designers, citizens and government officials must honour this one eternal principle of life. Nigel Thrift and Ash Amin consider change as urban life’s “basic ontology”.[20] Life never follows a single path, telos is not just deferred but kept as an unimageable potential. The telos is unimageable because, as Deleuze writes, each moment in life is capable of folding in multiple forces hence transforming and increasing the potentials that moment of life can open unto. Each moment of life is in fact between what it was and the multiplicities it may become.[21]
Design may tend to life’s only “constant” – its state of change, its becoming. It is not about representing change for designers and their work stand within the changing city and not at the end of history to reflect on the entirety of life. Geographer John Pløger notes, a city’s vitality is a field of forces and not an object that can be put on paper as a graphic or text.[22] Vitality is a city’s formless form. The urban designer recognises this fact. Likewise, those between-times and between-moments Deleuze speaks of will always exist. So, what is design’s purpose if such energy already exists? Design brings these basic existential conditions into attention so that we as a community do not pretend the perfect city can lie peacefully at the end of history; history and precisely time itself is a becoming. This is design’s immanent philosophic act.
How can urban design facilitate greater potentialities for change, rather than forcing allegiance to this or that social category or identikit political idealism? How can the design of urban spaces help spur a life lived for its own ends and hopes as per Spinoza’s free society? These questions cannot be adequately addressed if we keep urban design’s function as merely representational or as strive towards imageable ends.
Design can be approached as an act that opens up possibilities instead of reducing the city to a slogan-like identity. In consideration of change and true community participations, design’s purpose may be geared toward transformations, challenges and play instead of limits. This is why the question of how urban designers may develop new ways to approach the city instead of relying solely on conventional plans and documentations is important. There is perhaps value in including within client presentations plans, drawings and other media elements that challenge the telic character of design. Epistemological and methodological changes are vital.
The ‘right’ city or community, if change and vitality are a city’s formless forms, becomes something irreducible. It is interesting to note that for the Spinoza-inspired Agamben the a coming community’s “ethical” character becomes evident only when it is recognised that “the good is not, and cannot be, a good thing or possibility beside or above every bad thing or possibility, that the authentic and the true are not real predicates of an object perfectly analogous (even if opposed) to the false and the inauthentic.”[23] A coming community’s ethics is formed by the oscillations between different modes of being and thinking, it is immanent in the complexity and conflicts that are present at acts of co-creation, participatory designs and other interdisciplinary exercises. Ethics are guided by actual situations, and situations bring about change in subject and place. Ethics likewise can be reproduced from the contraction and expulsion, the regrouping, of various social, interpersonal, political, spatial, historical and architectural forces. Ethics are eternally in an ungrounding process. The ethical life is here and yet to come.
To plan a community’s identity is to actually find ways to sustain such conflicts and complexity. Thrift gives designers the advice to be ready to “take hold of accidents and slips, [and be] able to draw on skills that can conjure up other wheres.”[24] We plan not for what future communities must be. Instead we plan, design and build groups of forces – political, architectural, spatial, cultural, economical, etc – needed to sustain the potential emergence of communities which place and being is yet-known. Of course, the actual methods involved in carrying out these transformative and potential-bearing acts cannot be prescribed. As we have seen with Foucault and Agamben, the task of philosophy when mingled with design is never to decide which design action is good or bad. There is only the momentary appropriateness of certain groups of forces that, for a certain project (situated-action), express a power to effect change more swiftly. Again, design actions are only to be founded in the actuality of the task, the design-situation.
A city or community’s worth is its potential for change through the recognition, inclusion and sustaining of conflicts and challenges. And these conflicts and challenges are often found(ed) in interdisciplinary design situations manifested in life.
[1] Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition (P. Patton, trans.). London and New York: Continuum. 1994. p.39
[2] Foucault quoted in James Miller. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1993. p.235
[3] Bent Flyvberg and Tim Richardson. “Planning and Foucault: In Search of the Dark Side of Planning Theory” in Planning Futures: New Directions for Planning Theory (P. Allmendinger and M. Tewdwr-Jones, eds.). London and New York: Routldege. 2002, p.57
[4] Michel Foucault. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected essays and Interviews (D.F. Bouchard and S. Simon, eds. and trans.). Ithaca: Cornell UP. 1977. p.208
[5] Flyvberg and Ricahrdson. P.57
[6] Ibid. p.60
[7] Giorgio Agamben. The Coming Community (M. Hardt. Trans.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. p.1
[8] Giorgio Agamben. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (D. Heller-Roazen, ed. & trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. 1999. p.215
[9] Ibid. p.216
[10] Jean-Luc Nancy. The Sense of the World (J.S. Librett, trans.). Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press. 1997. p.118
[11] Ibid. p.119
[12] Agamben. 1999. p.208
[13] Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. 1004. p.24
[14] Nigel Thrift. “Summoning life” in Envisioning Human Geographies (P. Cloke, P. Crang, & M. Goodwin, eds.). London: Arnold Press. 2004, p.85
[15] Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” in Diacritics (16:1, Spring 1986, 22-7). p.24
[16] Ibid. p.26
[17] Agamben. 1993. p.19
[18] Benedict de Spinoza. “A Political Treatise” in A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise (R.H.M. Elwes, trans.). New York: Mineola. 2004. p.315
[19] Gilles Deleuze. “Immanence: A Life” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 (D. Lapoujade, ed. and A. Hodges and M. Taormina, trans.). New York and Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). 2006. p.387
[20] Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift. Cities: Reimagining the urban. Cambridge, UK: Polity. 2002. p.26-30
[21] Deleuze. 2006. p.388
[22] John Pløger. “In Search of Urban Vitalis” in Space and Culture (9:4, November 2006, 382-399). p.389
[23] Agamben. 1993. p.13
[24] Thrift. 2004. p.97
It’s true that certain people... are not likely to find advice or instructions in my books to tell them ‘what is to be done.’ But my project is precisely to bring about that they ‘no longer know what to do,’ so that the acts, gestures, discourses that up until then had seemed to go without saying become problematic, difficult and dangerous.[2]Foucault’s philosophy’s contribution to urban design is not prescriptive. As Bent Flyvberg and Tim Richardson remind us Foucault never intended his philosophy to dictate what our practice should pan out.[3] It is rather how we extract conceptual, textual and poetic forces from his works to recompose our current epistemology, theoretical frameworks, methodologies and methods. An asymmetry exists between Foucault’s concepts and the actions that follow. This is what distinguishes Foucault’s philosophy from more traditional political philosophy that desires clear outcomes. In a conversation with Gilles Deleuze, Foucault says,
A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself.[4]
The actions that follow an engagement with Foucault’s work arise from a “situated action”. A situated action is not just an application of a theory to a posterior example; philosophy holds no superiority here.[5] A designer picks out certain conceptual forces from philosophy in order to combine with those spatial and conceptual forces s/he is already acquainted with from his/her practice. A designer must use Foucault’s works in reality, in actual design-situations. Only through actual usages do new actions and designed-forms emerge. In the actuality of a design-situation one may also encounter other lines of thought, some running smoothly alongside Foucault’s, so breaking Foucault’s apart. Moreover, sometimes the practice of design may force us to rethink the arguments within certain theories. For example, communicating with a neighbourhood’s citizens may reveal unusual power relations that contributes to this neighbourhood’s uniqueness, thus a new theory of spatial planning may be required to understand and ultimately sustain this uniqueness. A strictly Foucauldian mode of approaching power relations for this neighbourhood may not be fully adequate; other lines of thought may be drawn in. Foucault may have to be read alongside Heidegger, indigenous concepts of space as well as the musings of Douglas Coupland. A situated action of design occasions an event of invention and differentiation. Disciplines are interwoven into each other. Within this complex actual design-situation it is not just new places and identities that may emerge, new ways to write spatial planning theory may emerge.
An actual design-situation for urban design involves more than what occurs in a studio. It involves working with actual peoples, places and shifting networks of concepts. Thus, Flyvberg and Richardson suggest that urban design should pay attention to ‘realrationality” rather than normative rationality. They suggest a move away from ideal situations. Designers can shift focus away from ‘what should be done’ and make a “reorientation toward ‘what is actually done’ – towards verita effectuale”.[6] We pay attention to new voices that are emerging in actuality. We decipher what forces constitute these voices and most importantly design new strategies to engage with these voices and forces. These voices cannot be generalised. Thus, when working with a community we have to sincerely ask: Are we trying to make that community see a designer’s point of view, or, are we together with that community designing a new point of view which possibly is yet expressible according to normative categories of place and identity. In an interdisciplinary practice it is less a matter of designing-for and more a designing-with. Designing-with expresses that ‘inter’ condition discussed earlier.
Within an interdisciplinary approach our conventional modes of analysis and disciplinary knowledge are broken don when we encounter unfamiliar groups of forces. When we are designing-with others it is often harder to image an absolute outcome. As Foucault suggests, we often ‘no longer know what to do’ when this mingling happens. However, this not-knowing can be an interesting departure point. In not-knowing we seek out new modes of thinking and acting, we start to communicate with others in new ways to gather information and build new criteria to decipher these information. In not-knowing we begin to build new conceptual and eventually practical frameworks instead of reiterating old frameworks that are colonial in expression.
What can designers learn from painters, and vice versa? How can the acts of painting and installation become mingled with acts of site analysis, typological studies and streetscape drawings, and how will this mingling change the current conceptions of place and subjectivity imagined by urban designers?
Most importantly, we may ask how our existing approaches to design and design thinking are challenged when we hear fellow participants speak in actuality. What new lines of thinking about place and subjectivities are being generated in this actuality that can seem even frightful? The speed at which forces can collide within the actuality of an interdisciplinary design-situation spur us to experiment with thinking and acting on subjectivities and places in ways the comfortable pace of a normative and isolated ideal situation does not foster. We ask: What new places and subjectivities can arise from this not-knowing?
Making Potential Communities
The means to carry out designs of a city are continually changing. We already conduct a variety of exercises to ensure this continuity; the post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is one obvious example. There is a distinction between maintaining this continuity for the sake of achieving an ideal city/citizenry and maintaining this continuity to promote the constant differentiation of place and subjectivity. How a POE is drafted and analysed is important if a city’s complexity is to be sustained. The data gathered from a POE if it is to be put into various redesign acts must again involve the community at hand. The community should be brought into new series of actual design-situations. Critical spatial and social planning reminds us the POE is done not just to see whether urban designers have done a good enough job, but to provide data – voices and forces – that allows for the design of a community in transformation.
Communities are made, unmade and remade. The form and identity of a community is always coming. The “coming community” for philosopher Giorgio Agamben is characterised by a “whatever being”. For Agamben, this “whatever” is tied to what a singularity which is not so much an unchanging entity but a singularity in the sense of something that is ready to become something else. The “whatever being” is thus a being that possesses great potentials.[7]
An important thing to remember about potentiality according to Agamben is that potentiality is never divorced from actuality. While the word ‘potential’ generally denotes something that is set in the future, Agamben locates potentialities in the actual present. Additionally, Agamebn suggest that potentiality is more than something one can predict, it can also be that which is unimageable (unrepresentable). He elaborates, every thought also “exists as a potential not to think,” and every word or sentence written is also the potential not to write.[8] What is written is inclusive of what is yet to be written. However, what is yet to be written does not designate only the opposite of what has already been written, in other words something imageable. Potentiality for Agamben includes something truly unqualifiable and unquantifiable at present but nonetheless is in the present. He surmises:
Pure actuality, that is, the actuality of an act, is pure potentiality, that is, the potentiality of potentiality.[9]
Agamben’s notions of potentiality can be further elaborated through Jean-Luc Nancy’s formulation on writing: “Writing [is] that which does not respond to any model whatsoever of the appropriation of significations, that which opens at once relation and, along with relation, significance itself.” The “message” of this kind of writing is not a “signified”; it is not even a plurality of relativised signifiers, but what Nancy calls “the toward.”[10] What writing offers is the intensive move towards something that cannot be mapped out in advance. What writing signifies is the potentiality of the multiple ways a text can be engaged with. For example, the kind of actions and thoughts that may emerge from engaging with Foucault’s writings is innumerable. Thus, writing is not about locking down the world in textual representation and making prescriptions. Nancy suggests, writing that expresses this “toward” tend forth to a community that resists its own hypostasis.[11] This asymmetrical relationship between writing and action expresses the more profound unimageable potentiality that Agamben speaks of.
Agamben and Nancy’s understanding of actuality to harbour potentiality mainly regards literature and philosophic writings. However, this approach to the unity of actuality and potentiality can be expressed in urban and community design. To design neighbourhoods for a community is not to lock people and place into one identity. To design is to gather new groupings of socio-historical, economical, artistic, textual, spatial, conceptual and cultural forces that may express subjectivities and spatialities yet to come. Urban designers are not fates. In other words, the actuality of a design practice expresses the potential of potentialities and new actualities. It is this point about actuality that connects back to earlier discussions on Foucault’s stress on situated-actions instead of ideal environments for the understanding and making of societies.
In designing a coming community the whole traditional scheme of signification, the equivalence between subjectivity and object, concept and object is challenged.[12] This is especially true when dealing with Vancouver, a field of criss-crossing local and international forces. There will never be a designed building or site that can unproblematically represent a coming Vancouver. Homi Bhabha writes that “identikit political idealism” ignores the reality of history-making which always threatens binary and sequential historiography. The political object of a transformative community is “neither the one nor the other, [it] properly alienates out political expectations.”[13]
So what are the actual signs of a community that alienates out political expectations? Nigel Thrift, in consideration of a vitalist urban life, suggests “temporary articulations of creating/inventing,” which can spur actions and outcomes that destabilise the urban and social fabric in order to reform new modes of being. And, this process of actualising and de-actualising to occasion new potentials perpetually renews itself.[14] Thus, when considering a vital Vancouver identikit buildings and neighbourhoods representing identikit political idealism are of little value. The vital is not something merely postulated but that which is acting. It can be experimentations with physical design conducted together by designers, the citizens and the City Hall. Beyond simple civil disobedience there can be experimentations with physical design conducted together by designers, the citizens and City Hall. Here, micro-zones or temporary re-zones may be outcomes.
In a vitalist city zones are in reality changing their function. The physical designs originally designated by a zoning code can be acted upon differently: Parks built to beautify and pacify a neighbourhood may be used by activists. Service lanes may become outdoor venues for art exhibitions. Neighbourhood cornershops and butcheries as much as three blocks from main arterials become galleries. Houses within residential zones may become gallery spaces where future generations of urban designers may gather. Temporary and permanent structures facilitating explorations on social relations and modes of living are built in backyards. A community’s sense of place and identity is constantly reproduced in its varying engagement with the city’s physical design.
All the abovementioned usages of the physical environment are heterotopias. Places like these are at once inside proper city zones and outside of these zones.[15] The capability of having multiple places exist within a physical boundary is partly made possible by its use that defies alignment with traditional observance of time. As we have seen a house can function as a residence and a gallery at different times. But, this temporal quality of heterotopias is expressed not just through the defiance of traditional observance of work-time. While places designed with utopic visions in mind tend toward the eternal, heterotopias “are absolutely temporal.”[16] What is built may be temporary; they allow new forces in and out of their assemblage hence allowing different futures to potentially emerge.
To sustain vitality a designer recognises his/her physical design as merely providing spatial, material, infrastructural forces to a city or neighbourhood, how these forces are used can be rather open. An asymmetry exists between a community’s subjectivity and the physical design of a neighbourhood. A physical design is an actuality that provides the conditions for the emergence of potentialities.
Community, as Agamben writes, is an infinite series of modal oscillations between actuality and potentiality. The politics of a coming community is no longer a duel between the State and the people. It is no longer setting up communities that are diametric opposites of the State. To do so still abides by the spatial, subjectival and economical zonings desired by conventional and colonial modes of planning. Rather, a coming community’s political object and identity oscillates between what it actually is presently and what it is becoming (its potentialities).[17] More importantly this will to transformation is embodied by the city leaders as well. In a coming-Vancouver our policy-makers will weave the city’s complex forces into their epistemology and methodology. In a coming-Vancouver policy-makers, designers and citizens recognise that within any master plan drawn there are maps and zones yet drawn, and from these potential maps and zones yet-defined subjectivities and places exist.
Worthy life
Potentialities are hopes for changes that may be greater than the designated futures we are too used to. On the subject of hope and society, Baruch Spinoza writes,
For a free multitude is guided more by hope than fear; a conquered one, more by fear than hope: inasmuch as the former aims at making use of life, the latter but at escaping death. The former, I say, aims at living for its own ends, the latter if forced to belong to the conqueror; and so we say that this is enslaved, but that free.[18]
Spinoza’s free multitude, a society guided by multiplicity and change, is that which attends to the living of life, recognising that life is expressed by change rather than by static being. Drawing from Spinoza’s understanding of life, Deleuze writes,
A life is everywhere, in every moment which a living subject traverses and which is measured by the objects that have been experienced, an immanent life carrying along the events or singularities that are merely actualised in subjects and objects. The indefinite life does not itself have moments, however close they may be, but only between-times, between-moments. It does not arrive, it does not come after, but presents the immensity of an empty time where one sees the event to come and already past, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness.[19]
Designers, citizens and government officials must honour this one eternal principle of life. Nigel Thrift and Ash Amin consider change as urban life’s “basic ontology”.[20] Life never follows a single path, telos is not just deferred but kept as an unimageable potential. The telos is unimageable because, as Deleuze writes, each moment in life is capable of folding in multiple forces hence transforming and increasing the potentials that moment of life can open unto. Each moment of life is in fact between what it was and the multiplicities it may become.[21]
Design may tend to life’s only “constant” – its state of change, its becoming. It is not about representing change for designers and their work stand within the changing city and not at the end of history to reflect on the entirety of life. Geographer John Pløger notes, a city’s vitality is a field of forces and not an object that can be put on paper as a graphic or text.[22] Vitality is a city’s formless form. The urban designer recognises this fact. Likewise, those between-times and between-moments Deleuze speaks of will always exist. So, what is design’s purpose if such energy already exists? Design brings these basic existential conditions into attention so that we as a community do not pretend the perfect city can lie peacefully at the end of history; history and precisely time itself is a becoming. This is design’s immanent philosophic act.
How can urban design facilitate greater potentialities for change, rather than forcing allegiance to this or that social category or identikit political idealism? How can the design of urban spaces help spur a life lived for its own ends and hopes as per Spinoza’s free society? These questions cannot be adequately addressed if we keep urban design’s function as merely representational or as strive towards imageable ends.
Design can be approached as an act that opens up possibilities instead of reducing the city to a slogan-like identity. In consideration of change and true community participations, design’s purpose may be geared toward transformations, challenges and play instead of limits. This is why the question of how urban designers may develop new ways to approach the city instead of relying solely on conventional plans and documentations is important. There is perhaps value in including within client presentations plans, drawings and other media elements that challenge the telic character of design. Epistemological and methodological changes are vital.
The ‘right’ city or community, if change and vitality are a city’s formless forms, becomes something irreducible. It is interesting to note that for the Spinoza-inspired Agamben the a coming community’s “ethical” character becomes evident only when it is recognised that “the good is not, and cannot be, a good thing or possibility beside or above every bad thing or possibility, that the authentic and the true are not real predicates of an object perfectly analogous (even if opposed) to the false and the inauthentic.”[23] A coming community’s ethics is formed by the oscillations between different modes of being and thinking, it is immanent in the complexity and conflicts that are present at acts of co-creation, participatory designs and other interdisciplinary exercises. Ethics are guided by actual situations, and situations bring about change in subject and place. Ethics likewise can be reproduced from the contraction and expulsion, the regrouping, of various social, interpersonal, political, spatial, historical and architectural forces. Ethics are eternally in an ungrounding process. The ethical life is here and yet to come.
To plan a community’s identity is to actually find ways to sustain such conflicts and complexity. Thrift gives designers the advice to be ready to “take hold of accidents and slips, [and be] able to draw on skills that can conjure up other wheres.”[24] We plan not for what future communities must be. Instead we plan, design and build groups of forces – political, architectural, spatial, cultural, economical, etc – needed to sustain the potential emergence of communities which place and being is yet-known. Of course, the actual methods involved in carrying out these transformative and potential-bearing acts cannot be prescribed. As we have seen with Foucault and Agamben, the task of philosophy when mingled with design is never to decide which design action is good or bad. There is only the momentary appropriateness of certain groups of forces that, for a certain project (situated-action), express a power to effect change more swiftly. Again, design actions are only to be founded in the actuality of the task, the design-situation.
A city or community’s worth is its potential for change through the recognition, inclusion and sustaining of conflicts and challenges. And these conflicts and challenges are often found(ed) in interdisciplinary design situations manifested in life.
[1] Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition (P. Patton, trans.). London and New York: Continuum. 1994. p.39
[2] Foucault quoted in James Miller. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1993. p.235
[3] Bent Flyvberg and Tim Richardson. “Planning and Foucault: In Search of the Dark Side of Planning Theory” in Planning Futures: New Directions for Planning Theory (P. Allmendinger and M. Tewdwr-Jones, eds.). London and New York: Routldege. 2002, p.57
[4] Michel Foucault. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected essays and Interviews (D.F. Bouchard and S. Simon, eds. and trans.). Ithaca: Cornell UP. 1977. p.208
[5] Flyvberg and Ricahrdson. P.57
[6] Ibid. p.60
[7] Giorgio Agamben. The Coming Community (M. Hardt. Trans.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. p.1
[8] Giorgio Agamben. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (D. Heller-Roazen, ed. & trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. 1999. p.215
[9] Ibid. p.216
[10] Jean-Luc Nancy. The Sense of the World (J.S. Librett, trans.). Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press. 1997. p.118
[11] Ibid. p.119
[12] Agamben. 1999. p.208
[13] Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. 1004. p.24
[14] Nigel Thrift. “Summoning life” in Envisioning Human Geographies (P. Cloke, P. Crang, & M. Goodwin, eds.). London: Arnold Press. 2004, p.85
[15] Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” in Diacritics (16:1, Spring 1986, 22-7). p.24
[16] Ibid. p.26
[17] Agamben. 1993. p.19
[18] Benedict de Spinoza. “A Political Treatise” in A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise (R.H.M. Elwes, trans.). New York: Mineola. 2004. p.315
[19] Gilles Deleuze. “Immanence: A Life” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 (D. Lapoujade, ed. and A. Hodges and M. Taormina, trans.). New York and Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). 2006. p.387
[20] Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift. Cities: Reimagining the urban. Cambridge, UK: Polity. 2002. p.26-30
[21] Deleuze. 2006. p.388
[22] John Pløger. “In Search of Urban Vitalis” in Space and Culture (9:4, November 2006, 382-399). p.389
[23] Agamben. 1993. p.13
[24] Thrift. 2004. p.97
