APL Design Yearbook 2010-11 - Newcastle University

Social Mapping – Master
Planning: Foundations for the
Overcoming of Certainty
Dr Nathaniel Coleman
Nathaniel Coleman is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Newcastle
University. He first studied architecture at the Institute for
Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City, holds BFA and
BArch degrees from RISD, a MUP degree from the CUNY Program
in Urban Design, and MSc and PhD degrees from UPenn. Previously,
Coleman practiced in New York and Rome, and taught in the US.
A recipient of Graham Foundation and British Academy grants,
Coleman’s research concerns the problematic of Utopia in relation
to architecture history, theory, and design, and the city. Other
research interests include the social dimension of architecture,
and pedagogy. Coleman is the author of Utopias and Architecture
(2005), his most recent publication is the collection he edited,
Imagining and Making the World: Reconsidering Architecture and
Utopia (2011), he has also published nationally and internationally
in edited books and journals.
Although ‘Social Mapping’ and ‘Master
Planning’ may conjure up anxieties linked
to the excesses of orthodox modern
architecture and planning, the persisting
value of both for imagining the just city
is advanced here, albeit in potentially
surprising ways, and in relation to Utopia.
Social Mapping – Master Planning:
Foundations for the Overcoming of
Certainty
Social Mapping and Master Planning
are phrases that at first glance suggest
something authoritarian, at the very least
top-down, and perhaps even panoptic
in their sweep. Under current conditions
both are at best anomalous and at worst
retrograde: how can you map the social
and who (or whom) could have the nerve
to claim for themselves the title of master
of the plan? And yet, the antithesis of social
mapping and master planning, in lieu of
the autogestion Henri Lefebvre envisioned,
which the distorting myths of some Big
Society seem only to place at an ever
further remove (as a kind of pathological
utopia akin to Disney World), architects,
planners and urban designers must
continue to find ways to imagine futures
for neighbourhoods, villages, towns, and
cities that do not descend into the anarchic
narcissism of absent planning controls and
radically free-markets (or the determinism
of the immediate post-war period).
Feature / Dr Nathaniel Coleman 139
So, there it is: in this instance, Social
Mapping and Master Planning have been
turned on their heads. Apart from the
linguistic (or other forms of) gymnastics this
suggests, the intention is radical. Under
the cover of a dubious self-proclaimed
progressiveness, prophets of nothingness
suggest that there is a correlation between
anti-planning, that is its abdication, and
the provision of settings invented by their
users. Long ago such perspectives were
called into question during the epoch of
abstract orthodox modernist architecture
and planning, with their obsession for the
generalized, not to say generic, and the
abstract. The paradox remains, individual
and group appropriation (individual and
social imagination even) are nourished
by carefully defined settings, made up of
articulate elements that establish a field
of appropriation as much as of response.
And here I am reluctant to name adherents
of either faction, the non-definers and
definers alike, not least because I wish
to remain focused on the theoretical
aims of this essay but also because I
would like to avoid sidelining readers into
discussions around what they do or do not
like. However, this evasiveness is not just
self-serving in its apparent cowardice; its
primary aim is to be generative, in just the
ways Social Mapping and Master Planning
suggest impossible thought experiments
that are nonetheless possible.