Extract from Pablo Sendra’s paper, 16 December 2015. Full publication can be found here.
Rethinking urban public space – Assemblage thinking and the uses of disorder, by Pablo Sendra
An excellent example of the capacity of urban design to reassemble public space and encourage citizenship and sociability is the process of transformation of Gillett Square in the London Borough of Hackney.
It is an open space that used to be a car park and has been brought back to life. What is interesting in this process is that design has had a very important role in transforming this space into a public realm where improvisation takes place and where people interact with strangers. This process gives relevance
to one fundamental question: can design help to transform public spaces into places for social interaction and improvisation?
The process of bringing this place back to life started in the 1980s and was developed jointly by Hackney Co-operative Developments (HCD) and the London Borough of Hackney (LBH) (Hart 2003, 238). HCD detected a lack of public space in the area and saw that this derelict area could become a place for collective use. They therefore worked with designers Hawkins/Brown to
transform this space into a public square. This need may not have been noticed by locals, who were using the vacant space as a car park. However, it was the act of reassembling the public realm that made the need for a place for social interaction visible.
The first act of reassembling was the refurbishment of the workspaces and the installation of the kiosks in 1996 (Hart 2003, 238). The kiosks hosted local businesses, many of them run by Afro-Caribbean people from the area. The presence of the kiosks encouraged people to start gathering between the stalls and the car park. This made the need for public space evident, and the change all the more natural. The process continued with the design of the square, a collaboration process between HCD, LBH and the designers—the architectural practice Hawkins/Brown. The design of the square was carried out with public consultation, but this alone would not have sufficed to achieve the present vitality of the square. One of the keys to this success was reassembling this derelict space by introducing new material elements to provide an urban surface that people can engage with. An urban infrastructure is provided in the form of kiosks for starting local businesses, an urban surface to develop activities and storage for temporary structures, equipment for sports and games such as table tennis and many other urban ‘props’ that can be arranged in different ways by the people who use the square. In this way, the square is assembled and reassembled every day for different purposes.
This example illustrates how urban designers, local organizations, diverse actors and people can collectively imagine how public space might work otherwise. Instead of just identifying the problems, designers should propose new situations, new arrangements of the public realm. To do so, the first
step should be the identification of processes and activities already taking place in the area. The strategies should aim to incorporate urban objects, new spatial configurations, mutations on the urban grid to make it expressive, promote existing activities and encourage the emergence of new ones.
Convergence of diversity
This concept addresses the relationship between the atmosphere of place and the way people perceive and interact with strangers. Looking at this reading of assemblage can help urban designers build the ‘inclusive
urban commons’ that McFarlane (2011a, 220) invokes. Amin (2008, 2010) argues that whether diversity is successful or not in an urban space depends not only on the ethics of interpersonal encounter, but also on the
assemblage between people and their environment. This means that in order to create spaces which provoke constructive conflicts, practitioners should think of public spaces that create an atmosphere of place where encountering difference prompts positive feelings, thus addressing Sennett’s demand for public spaces that prepare adults to face unknown situations.
Sennett (1970) argued that people would become more tolerant through the everyday experience of diversity. However, the simple idea of throwing diversity together will produce social interactions, which lead to policies promoting diversity without qualifying public space sparking off social
tension and antagonistic conflict (Amin 2008). In turn, these contribute to the
destruction of public space, achieving the opposite of the desired result. Amin explains that the virtues of diversity in public space are subject to certain spatial arrangements: ‘open, crowded, diverse, incomplete, improvised,
and disorderly or lightly regulated’ (Amin 2008, 10).
Gillett Square is a good example of the ‘inclusive urban commons’ that McFarlane talks about. It is a place where different people meet, interact and share a common ground. People do not feel threatened by the presence of strangers and interaction might or might not happen depending on the situation. The place is frequented by young skaters, by local children who play
with the available games, by people who stand around the kiosks, by people playing table tennis or drinking on the benches. They all share the space and interact on specific occasions (Figure 2). This feeling of ‘conviviality’ (Amin 2008) has been possible due to the sociomaterial processes that have taken place: the affordable kiosks have meant that collectives that otherwise would not have been able to afford to rent a place in the area have been able to develop their business in the square. This has allowed these people to be a key part of the process and has made the place welcoming for everyone. This was combined with the location in the square of the Dalston Culture House cultural centre and the jazz bar Vortex, which attract other types of public, adding diversity to the square. The management of the square also plays a very important role in making it inclusive. Volunteers are in charge of opening the containers that are on the side of the square and taking out the different props used for activities such as table tennis, children’s games or film
screenings. This has made people responsible for the place and created a real sense of responsibility for the maintenance of the square.
Gillett Square is a good example of place qualified for diversity. It responds to Amin’s (2010) proposals for creating conditions for diversity: ‘multiplicity’ and ‘common ground’. Gillett Square is an enabling public space where diverse collectives and individuals can participate. It provides public infrastructure in the form of kiosks, spaces for businesses, concert venues, bars, new paving in the square and urban elements that can be stored in the two containers that stand on the side of the square.
Gillett Square exemplifies how a space can become a shared place for everyday life and for specific activities. The urban surface becomes a ‘patterned ground’ (Amin 2008) due to its use by the people, where the hierarchies of power and domination fade, where people feel comfortable with the presence of strangers, a sense of comfort which can lead at times to social interaction and other forms of citizenship.
Complex connections
Gillett Square is an example of how a designed intervention can encourage unpredictable or informal uses of public space. Gillett Square is an intervention in borders: it is located close to a high street but is in a side street, among workspaces, car parks, private houses and close to council estates.
What is interesting about the case of Gillett Square is that design plays a very important role in encouraging informality. Normally, in the examples used by different authors to describe informality (Simone 2011; McFarlane 2011d), the role of design is almost insignificant and the unplanned activities are the
product of other kinds of assemblages. In contrast, in Gillett Square the provision of an urban surface, of urban infrastructure and of other material objects are some of the actors that enable new assemblages and prompt situations that may not have been planned by the designers. The conception of the square, the activities that take place in it and the human relationships that occur there would not have been possible without a design intervention. This case illustrates how the provision of an urban surface makes the intersection between urban life and the urban surface possible.
The urban surface—its materiality and its multiple possibilities—plays a very important role in generating new assemblages. Urban design interventions that seek to create urban disorder as informality in public space should design a surface where different activities, urban elements and situations can be assembled.
The design concepts explained here assess the importance of looking at the sociomaterial relationships and connections in order to propose new possibilities for the arrangement of public space. As explained, it is from these
connections that unplanned use of public space can emerge. However, some of these processes may also arise from disconnections in the systems, points that are not designed or that are on the edge. This leads to the creation of spaces where not all elements are rationally connected or function in their traditional position, allowing disconnections to happen by leaving public space unfinished and adaptable to change, as Sennett (2007, 2008) suggests in his recent essays. Consequently, it becomes necessary to introduce another set of concepts to explain how to incorporate certain types of disorder into public space: the set of concepts that work on ‘disassembly’.
Disassembly
Failures and disconnections are necessary to keep the city in a continuous state of adaptation and upgrade (Graham and Thrift 2007). According to Graham and Thrift (2007), it is when there is a failure that infrastructures
are repaired, improved and upgraded. They also argue that infrastructures
that are built bit by bit are more susceptible to adaptation—which makes them more resilient—than those that are conceived as a whole. A recent debate published in City (2015) goes beyond Graham and Thrift’s (2007) argument about the contact with infrastructure when it breaks down and analyses
how interaction between individuals and infrastructure at a micro scale can be useful to explain macro social and political contexts (Angelo and Hentschel 2015).
This debate on repair and maintenance of urban infrastructure can be applied to the intervention in public space in the modern city. As Sennett (2007) argues, the rigidity of modern urban environments has made it very difficult to adapt to changing conditions, a fact which makes public space in these urban areas ‘brittle’. This rigidity has made it very difficult to intervene and to adapt
them to new needs, something which has facilitated their obsolescence and decay. To reverse this character of modern urban environments, interventions should improve the capacity of public space to adapt to changeable conditions. Using the notion of ‘disassembly’, two design concepts that introduce certain positive uses of disorder into public space are proposed:
the first is to transform public spaces into ‘open systems’ (Sennett 2007, 2008)— which are built bit by bit, evolve daily and experience constant additions—and the second is to accept ‘failure and disconnection’ as natural to the public realm and as an opportunity to upgrade.
Open systems
The modern city was conceived as a machine, as a stable entity where everything is functionally arranged and works properly. The Athens Charter proposed the ‘functional city’, where the four functions of the city—
dwelling, work, transport and leisure—are fixed to specific places or zones. This concept of the city is what Sennett (2007, 2008) defines as a ‘closed system’. Comparing urban complexity to nature, he defines closed systems as being in ‘equilibrium’, while open systems are in ‘unstable evolution’. In modernist urban developments, all functions are predetermined and there is no room for improvisation or for the uses of disorder that he advocated in his earlier book (Sennett 1970). This rigidity has facilitated the obsolescence of these urban areas, since they have not been able to adapt to current social and cultural needs. To reverse this stagnation, Sennett (2007, 2008) proposes turning public spaces that work as ‘closed systems’ into ‘open systems’. He suggests that this transformation is possible through architecture and urban design: he proposes the provision of a ‘skeleton’ composed by adding
different pieces (Sennett 2008), meaning that public space is actually built piece by piece, as Graham and Thrift (2007) suggest for urban infrastructure.
This idea of public space composed of the assemblage of small elements that can be substituted, re-plugged into other places and continuously modified depending on people’s use, can transform the rigid public spaces of the
modern city into places with the potential for continuous adaptation. This involves leaving public space partially unfinished, allowing constant adaptation. Sennett’s reasoning suggests a direct relationship between public
participation and physical public space and its design, expecting participation beyond urban governance and making it into a physical experience that comes with the design of public space. This experience is possible when the design is left unfinished.
Designers can add elements to public space in order to transform it into an open system that allows more additions. As Graham and Thrift (2007, 6) argue, the addition of ‘small increments’ can produce ‘large changes’ for
urban infrastructure and for innovation in knowledge. This means that urban design is a pure act of assemblage of small interventions that interact between each other, the sum of which affects the urban life of the public realm. Public space can be transformed into ‘open systems’ by rearranging open spaces and converting them into ‘colonisable ground’ (Sennett 2008, n.p.) where different elements can be added over time.
The example used here to illustrate the different design concepts, Gillett Square, is a good example of creating an open system through small additions and leaving the process open. The success of Gillett Square lies in its conception as a process. As explained, the first steps taken—installing the kiosks with affordable rents for local business and refurbishing the workspaces—made the need for the square evident. This made the urban transformation follow a step-by-step process which included years or research, public consultation, the involvement of local organizations and businesses, and the assistance of designers (Hart 2003, 239).
However, this initial process for the construction of the square is not enough to keep the space alive. The key to keeping space in continuous use is to leave the process open and unfinished. The urban design intervention has provided an urban surface and a set of temporary structures, equipment for sports, games, facilities and different urban elements stored in containers and managed by local volunteers (Figure 4). This very simple system makes it possible to reinvent the use of the square on a daily basis, while simultaneously involving locals in the management of the square, which can
bring collective empowerment. The infrastructure includes networks of exchange, human organization and management (see Tonkiss 2015). It also allows different collectives and minorities to participate: groups of
schoolchildren, the elderly, locals, young people from the area. This makes it possible to develop organized activities such as markets or film screenings (Figure 5) and other improvised activities such as skateboarding, table tennis and other kinds of meetings and encounters in the square.
Failure and disconnections
Modernist projects based on the Athens Charter tried to keep everything under control using urban design. Nowadays, institutions still avoid uncertainty (Sennett 2008), feeling threatened by unpredictable activities
that may emerge, and prefer projects where everything is precisely defined and monitored spaces where all is under control. However, contemporary urban thinking has experienced a shift that acknowledges failure as a condition of the city (Garcı´a Va´zquez 2004, 134). Accepting failure and
disconnection as conditions natural to the public realm implies seeing discontinuities as opportunities for upgrading public space. Thus, urban interventions should not aim to remove the failures of the city, but to redirect
them into something positive. Failure is what causes infrastructure to be constantly upgraded (Graham and Thrift 2007). In the same way, failure in public space should be seen as an opportunity to conceive things differently, to look for opportunities for upgrading and allowing uncertainty. This concept contributes to materializing Sennett’s positive uses of disorder by addressing
the following question: how can failure and disconnections provoke innovation and alternative uses of public space?
Two positive uses of failure can be applied to urban design interventions: firstly, failure as an opportunity to upgrade and improve public space and secondly, failure as a factor that allows uncertainty and provides urban
spaces that are outside the control of the city.
Identifying failures in urban public space is an opportunity to think about how it could work otherwise. This disjunction between the actual and the possible is one of the main points of assemblage and critical urbanism (McFarlane 2011a). Graham and Thrift (2007, 6) argue that ‘[r]epair and maintenance
does not have to mean exact restoration’, but it can also serve to think about how this infrastructure might work otherwise, to think it differently following new conditions. Dovey argues that architects and urban designers are among those thinking how the city might work differently. He also argues that, although they have gone wrong on many occasions, ‘the challenge is to get
better’ (Dovey 2011, 350). Urban designers should assume that there is a possibility of going wrong. To overcome this fear, they should make their intervention reversible, providing possibilities to improve and add
other interventions to it. Interventions should allow disconnections, without trying to plan for the rational connection and operation of everything.
The second positive reading of failure deals with allowing uncertainty and providing spaces that escape the forces of power and domination in the city. Here the question would be how to build the ‘unbound points’ and the ‘points of creativity’ that Deleuze (1986) talks about. Amin and Thrift (2002, 106) propose ‘providing space times where practices of power either do not
reach, or are heavily contested’. Creating spaces where uncertainty is possible is one of the main challenges that Sennett proposes in The Uses of Disorder and in more recent works. Modern urban developments on borders have a great potential for escaping the forces of domination. Their peripheral
condition makes them an opportunity for urban designers to think how they could work in a different way.
Gillett Square can also explain the positive uses of failure described here. Identifying the lack of public space in the area was what prompted the different agents to consider that this place might work differently and be upgraded. In the design of the square, it has also been important to leave some unbound points, realities that are not designed, which keep the place on the move and allow improvisation to take place.
However, the place is not totally immune to the forces of domination of the city. Certain interests are trying to remove deviancy from public space—the installation of CCTV, the frequent presence of police in the square. However, the interesting thing about this place is that despite these attempts to avoid
‘inappropriate’ behaviour from public space, the square is still resisting as a place where different kinds of people can meet, which is felt as a common asset by locals and visitors and where conflicts do not necessarily lead to forms of violence.
Conclusions
This paper has argued that assemblage thinking can be a tool for the introduction of the positive uses of disorder into the rigid public spaces of the modern city. Sennett’s uses of disorder can be summed up in four categories: building meaningful places that arouse cultural expression in public space,
generating citizenship that prompts tolerance and sociability, creating productive atmospheres that encourage the emergence of unplanned activities, and building a flexible public space that can easily mutate and adapt.
As regards transforming public spaces into meaningful places, the design concepts explained have addressed how to introduce mutations into the urban grid to make it expressive, which is one of Sennett’s (1990) proposals. To do so, the concept of ‘reassembling’ proposes the rearrangement of public
space with existing elements, introducing new ones in a way that encourages people to be more active in public life.
Another challenge posed by Sennett’s notion of disorder is how to create spaces that encourage tolerance towards difference and generate sociability. The design concept of ‘convergence of diversity’ proposes the construction of enabling public spaces that allow the creation of an awareness of the
commons, which can make people more tolerant towards strangers. A further proposal was to provide spaces that escape from the forces of control and domination in the city: nonregulated inclusive spaces at the boundaries
that originate other forms of self-regulation.
For converting urban surface into a productive atmosphere, into a fertile ground where informality and improvisation take place, the design concept of ‘complex connections’ proposes working on the sociomaterial
associations between the planned and the unplanned city. The paper has shown that to let the unplanned happen, it is necessary to leave the public realm partially unfinished, with no fixed functions.
This notion of leaving the public realm unfinished leads to the fourth use of disorder: building a flexible public realm that can constantly be upgraded, an idea that Sennett (2007, 2008) proposes in his recent essays. The set of design concepts that respond to the notion of ‘disassembly’—‘open systems’ and ‘failure and disconnections’—has proposed designing the public realm as the sum of different elements that can be assembled, disassembled and reassembled. It has also shown that ‘failures’ in the public realm can be seen
as opportunities to rethink and upgrade it.
These four uses of disorder have been addressed through two sets of design concepts: assemblage and disassembly. These design concepts are guidelines that can help urban designers, architects, planners and other actors involved in the design of public space to transform the city and build a more inclusive public realm.
Pablo Sendra
The full publication can be found here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604813.2015.1090184
Some of the pods at Gillett Square. Picture: Polly Hancock
Gillett Square in Dalston: ‘a place for imams to rub shoulders with skateboarders’ (not pictured).
