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 – C O N C L U D I N G R E F L E C T I O N Sprivate real estate developers) that sponge upon and vulgarize the urbanqualities in the area, can be seen as arisen out of a situation that over timehave been generated by individual tactics. When the opposition against theclearance programs came into existence 40 years ago and created a counterpressurethat resulted in a radical change in public strategies, the urbanneighbourhood of Grünerløkka was experiencing dramatic populationdecrease (cf. chapter 5). Since then several thousand million Norwegiankroner of public capital have been invested in upgrading housing andphysical infrastructures in the area, precisely in order to reverse the city’shousing market development from a situation of urban sprawl into a situationin which the more central and compact urban areas (once again) couldbecome attractive living areas. Both massive public investments in the areaand gradual changes in individual patterns of urban use (described above)have over time created a large market for new housing developments underthe auspices of commercial actors. Based on my typological andmorphological analyses (chapter 4 and 5) the problems addressed in thecritique of these projects seems though more related to impetuouscombination of architectural elements from different morphological systems:The series of new urban housing projects in the fringe areas of Grünerløkkaand Grønland consist in general of building types 419 that were invented aselements of an architectural system of freestanding buildings in an openurban landscape. When introduced in areas dominated by a totally differentarchitectural system (traditional urban blocks defining a system of publicaccessible, but spatially more or less closed outdoor spaces), the systematiccontrary use qualities of the new buildings and the surrounding system can besaid to reduce rather than strengthen each other. 420The abovementioned examples can be seen as an argument in a discussion of‘what comes first, the hen or the egg’, i.e. as a discussion of from whichperspective history should be written (or of whether historical developmentbest can be understood in terms of gradual evolution or series of revolutions).More interesting here, though, is what such a kind of altered perspectiveallow us to discover: By seeing manifestations of architectural strategies as419 Point blocks and slab blocks, although the latter more often are described as lamellae buildings inmarketing presentations.420 Especially bad are many of the housing estates’ common-private or semi-public outdoor areas. Theyprovide fairly mediocre and limited possibilities for outdoor activites, and children’s games and play. Thisunfortunate tendency is, as I see it, strengthened by the public economic support to lock off backyards andcourtyards in the adjacent old structure of urban blocks. One cannot actually blame private developers forwanting to exploit their plots to a maximum (that is, more or less, their quite predictable role), but one canreally question the knowledge base and ability to foresee and to deal with these problems among the planningauthorities. A central focus in the discourse on urban development and renewal for more than century has beenthe necessity to create better environments for upbringing of children. The poor quality of the outdoor areas ofinner city housing developments in recent years, can as such hardly be explained by lack of attentiveness orknowledge, but maybe rather as a counter-reaction that again will create a new counter-reaction.326