Reading Socio-Spatial Interplay - Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i ...

R E A D I N G S O C I O - S P A T I A L I N T E R P L A Y P A R T 1Urbanism was established as both a profession and an academic discipline.All this implied a new conception of types, not only as implicit socio-spatialsymbolicconventions, but explicitly proposed as tools for environmentalproduction: as socio-spatial prototypes or inventions. New plan types 220 (newsocio-spatial systems) were developed as theoretical, abstract models,including both new building types and new types of open areas, designed toserve new ideals of productive and reproductive life in the urban landscape,reflecting the rapidly changing rhythms of everyday life.But how should one go about to identify environmental types as socio-spatialtool-kits? Environmental types 221 can be described as systems of both builtform and more or less public open spaces. Environmental types representtheoretical models or sets of ideas, or socio-spatial logics, organizing asystem of more or less private and collective spaces. The types arerecognized by their form, 222 related to different ideals for urban life. All ofthis is expressed by the functional principles of spatial organization definingthe type. By recognizing the different types of environmental elements asrelated to a set of ideals of spatial functionality – i.e. as ideals of how thearchitecture of an area is designed to work – we can, without having to askeach and one of the architects involved in the production of theenvironmental tool kit, gain insights into aspects of common intentionality.Such a form of typological analysis of environmental tool-kits will includedescriptions of:- the characteristics of the spatial configuration (the physical form)which makes us recognize the type,- how spaces are related (to each other and to the urban spatialstructure as a whole – more or less directly, more or lesshierarchically), and- how functions are spatially integrated/segregated (the range ofsocio-spatial practices that are invited).220 One could of course object that there also existed pre-industrial plan types, representing abstract ideas andideals (the renaissance grid, classicist and baroque urban ensembles etc.), but the distinction is still valid: Theprofessionalization of environmental production represented a shift in how plan types were developed as sociospatialtechnocratic solutions for accommodating urban life for the masses. The pace of urban growth relatedto industrialization, and the gradual industrialization of environmental production, represented a shift in howlarge, relatively homogenous urban growth belts where laid out.221 A type is here understood in the way Rossi uses the concept with reference to Quatremère de Quincy: “Theword ‘type’ represents not so much the image of a thing to be copied or perfectly imitated as the idea of anelement that must itself serve as a rule for the model (…) Everything is precise and given in the model;everything is more or less vague in the type.” (Rossi 1984:40)222 As mentioned earlier, all typo-morphological analyses imply studies of architectural form: patterns in form,studies of variations and transformation of form, and discussions of “the lowest common multiple”characterizing the type (defined by formal characteristics). But form as such is not the aim of my study oftypes and their form.115