Chapter (2021) in Gerber, A., Iseli, R., Kurath, S. (eds.), Morphology and typology in the field of contemporary urban landscapes, Reimer Verlag, Berlin.
Lars Marcus
Architecture and urban design are suddenly the focus of future societies
Something seems to have happened at the Millennium. Since then we have seen a long series of crises of almost biblical dimensions. We have come to realize that polar-ices are melting rapidly and now risk sending floods over our low-lying cities. We have seen national economies eroded in a manner we thought to be of the past. We have seen human rights shaken at their foundations in nations we thought to be pillars of democracy. All together we feel our taken for granted social, economic and ecological systems wobble under our feet creating great uncertainty about our next step.
At the same time, we see broad and deep global shifts, most important perhaps an unprecedented urbanisation. It has been described in many ways: there are two new Vancouver’s built every week; in a few decades there will be urban areas built the size of France, Spain and Germany taken together; shortly, 70% of the world’s population will be living in cities. Importantly, since it is humans that create the crises above, this urbanisation means that these crises are increasingly becoming urban crises; it is how we live and cooperate with each other in cities that causes polar-ices to melt, economies to crash and societies to lose faith, even though that is not always where we most immediately see the effects.
Importantly for architecture and urban design, the built form of our cities is what sets the framework both for our everyday lives and many of our most important societal processes, why it becomes a vital part of these crises. But for the same reasons, we are starting to realise that the built form of our cities is a critical means in developing solutions to these crises. This is reflected in how most societal issues have become urban issues; established disciplines like sociology, economics and ecology are increasingly emphasising their urban dimensions and their sub-disciplines urban sociology, urban economics and urban ecology are growing rapidly. It is by living and cooperating in other ways in our cities that we may build a sustainable path forward. The built form of our cities structures and shapes these relations and is therefore an essential tool in this endeavour, which also means that these crises also have become an architectural problem. The world is simply tapping the shoulders of architects requesting their help – the question is if we are prepared.
Architecture and urban design are facing huge knowledge challenges
At the moment, this is far from obvious. The question may even be disturbing to many in the field. Architects, broadly speaking, want to continue to work with what they find the most important thing there is – architecture, and are convinced that architecture can create social equality, support the economy and generate sustainability and above all bring aesthetic experiences to the good for all. But architects are most often reluctant to test this hypothesis in the open and prefer their inner circles that without difficult enquiries support this belief. However, given current challenges, it is obvious that architects need to collaborate with other disciplines but even though most people in architecture would agree to this in principle, far fewer would agree that for this to happen we first need to face a fundamental internal challenge, that is, we need to articulate, define and make our own knowledge explicit to others or we will not be able to make the necessary connections with them.
Architecture has a history of defining itself as an exception, where its knowledge base is understood to be more or less impossible to explicitly express. In certain respects, this is true, but fundamentally it is due to our unusual emphasis on the practice of architecture and in particular the creative side of this practice. But in principle architecture is in this respect not different from any other practice. All practice is creative in that it fundamentally concerns intuitive action guided by principle, which we also can call theory. The critical issue is how well-founded this theory is, and here architecture remains underdeveloped. Importantly, the challenge here is not to learn more about sociology, economy or ecology, the challenge is to learn more and develop theoretical knowledge about our own central knowledge object, so that we may link this to knowledge in other disciplines such as sociology, economy and ecology.
It then seems obvious that this central knowledge object is architecture, but this is a word that often hides more than it reveals. A more mundane term, but also much more useful, is built form and the spatial structures it gives rise to. Whatever way we try to complicate things, at bottom this is what architecture is about. What architects do, is to produce drawings and plans from which it is possible to build structures that give shelter (firmitas) and express cultural marks (venustas), but perhaps above all create spatial relations that support daily life (utilitas).
Described in this way it may seem banal; it is not high-tech, it is not fine art, it is not deep thoughts – but it is far from banal; we are talking about the most sophisticated materia that humans have attached themselves to – perhaps language apart. What we call architecture concerns technical solutions, aesthetic expressions and social relations, all embodied in the same artefact, which is extraordinary in itself, but the truly exceptional thing is how all this is achieved by such simple means: bricks, wood, steel, glass! This seems to be the reason that both architects and others believe there is no need for theoretical support in architecture; it seems so simple, but it is far from simple – what we are dealing with is the system that harbours all other systems.
Looking at the magnitude of knowledge, time and material resources that humans through history have invested in building – there simply is no parallel – we must ask for the reason. A likely one seems to be that humans quickly have realized that life is transient, which has given rise to a need to seize this transience in more abiding materials, where the idea that the quick may be translated into the slow has been close at hand. Through history, we can see how humans have tried to capture the ephemeral in the enduring, in the manner where we still write down an important telephone number on a piece of paper. Built form is in this context an unusually powerful materia with the capacity to sustain social relations and cultural expressions over very long time spans. Thereby it helps us remember such relations and expressions, and more than that; it helps us reproduce them.
In this context, it is also important to remember that built form and the spatial structures that it gives rise to, despite being such a central resource in human history, not is the responsibility to develop knowledge on by any other group than people engaged in architecture. If we do not do that, there will not be anyone else that does it and this tremendous knowledge field will fall below the horizon and be substituted by other fields, something we for instance may witness in the current interest in smart city technology. According to this debate, cities are not doing its work properly but need to be enhanced by information technology. But is this really true or have people in architecture just been negligent and/or unable to explain and demonstrate what architecture and urban design really can do.
Built form and spatial structure are the central knowledge objects in architecture and urban design
Speaking about built form, we obviously may see many things in front of us. We may not least identify a fundamental distinction that we have touched upon above, between built form as aesthetic expression and as functional support. The first is related to our perception and the thoughts and connotations it gives rise to, that is, primarily to our mental and emotional faculties. The second is related to our physical constitution and the limits it sets to our ability to move, that is, primarily to our bodily faculties. Naturally, to be human means that these two continuously and seamlessly interplays, but it is also possible to see how built form at the same time can say something and do something, that is, it simultaneously relates both to our mental and bodily faculty. In extension it also means that architecture can say one thing and do another.
Figure 1. All physical artefacts including architecture embody both a relation between form and meaning and form and function. These cream pitchers all have the same function but convey very different meanings. This is the first important distinction in the study of architectural form since the study of the relation form-meaning demands very different methodologies than the study of the relation form-function. Importantly, that an architectural artefact conveys a certain meaning does not necessarily imply that it is able to perform the related function (Photo by the author).
This distinction also helps us clarify the difference and interdependence between built form and spatial structure. By way of built physical form humans structure space into particular spatial forms for human use. At the same time, it is spatial form that facilitates our ability to perceive built form, why we see how they are closely interdependent. But in relation to the distinction in architecture between aesthetic expression and functional support, we may also see how the first primarily relates to architecture as built form, which can develop into architectural signs that we may interpret the meaning of, while the second primarily relates to architecture as spatial structure, which we can make use of for both stationary and mobile activities.
Both of these dimensions are obviously essential for architecture, but it is primarily the latter we can relate to the huge challenges currently facing cities. The architecture of cities, in the meaning their spatial structure as defined by built form, simply is the container of most human activity, it is where we spend most of our time and where we keep most of our things, but it is also this architecture that structures and shapes most societal processes. When we speak about social segregation, local markets and urban ecosystems we do not find these outside these spatial forms, there simply is no such place. They are therefore by necessity defined, structured and directed by architecture. In this sense, architecture is a performative art, it does not only harbour human activity, it structures and shapes it. And importantly, this is not a choice of ours, it does so by necessity.
For instance, segregation is a spatial concept concerning things that are separated or at distance from each other, so if we speak about socially segregated cities this must have something, albeit not everything, to do with the spatial structure of our cities. That is to say, how we build our cities has a vital impact on whether they will support or discourage social segregation. Similarly, local markets are essentially constituted by spatial form, not so much the individual market street that we tend to think about, as the generation and direction of market demands to particular locations, which as cities have grown not so often correspond to the traditional marketplaces, but to highly accessible urban edge locations created by the spatial form of infrastructure. Finally, we may identify the same thing for urban ecosystems, whose functionality is highly dependent on the spatial relations between different urban green areas. When these relations are appropriately laid out and designed, we get living urban ecosystems that produce a long series of services to us, such as the cleaning of air, the pollination of plants and the creation of healthy micro-climates.
Spatial structure as a morphological system
In all these cases, however, we need a conceptual shift where we move from looking at urban space as a series of individual spaces to urban space as an interconnected system of spaces, thereby emphasizing the interrelation between individual spaces rather than the inherent qualities of the individual space. In other terms, such a shift concerns an emphasis on the location of the individual space in relation to the location of other spaces. This reflects how we increasingly are realizing how the world we live in, not is constituted by isolated people and things but by particular connections and relationships between people and things. Language has a tendency to fool us here in hiding how our habit to name different entities with words is hugely arbitrary and that the world in reality is a continuum where everything is connected to everything else in a complex manner.
To capture this relational aspect of urban space we need an adequate language. This is offered by geometry, which exactly concerns the description of space and spatial relations – any drawing, plan or map can here be an example. Hence, geometry allow us to describe most anything as spatial relations, both people and things, as well as space itself and suddenly we are on to something. In a sense, geometry allow us to describe the architecture of the world, that is, how people, things and locations are spatially related to each other.
There is an important point in stressing the idea of architecture here in favour of the more common idea of geography. Geography, generally speaking, describes people, things and locations as a spatial distribution on the surface of the earth, but whereas people and things in principle can be found anywhere, locations are set within the fixed grid of longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates. In geography everything is therefore described by what we can call absolute location. However, for a human, as well as most living organisms, the surface of the earth is not a neutral plane but a highly structured surface due to such things as topography and variations in water and soil, which makes different parts more accessible and liveable than others, depending on what kind of organism you are. On top of that, humans have created an artificial layer that we call the built environment, including large infrastructures, complex urban environments and individual buildings that further redistributes human accessibility.
Figure 2. To address current urban challenges we need a conceptual shift from an understanding of urban space as a set of urban parts to an understanding of urban space as an interconnected system, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts and the properties of the part is to a great degree given by its relation to the other parts. A set of identically designed urban neighbourhoods are given very different properties dependent on their relation to the other neighbourhoods of the city. This also reminds us that we as humans live in relative space as defined by architecture rather than in absolute space as defined by geography (Image by the author).
Now, to a large extent we do not live our lives in the natural landscape given by the earth but in this artificial landscape of our own making. The perhaps most important thing with this landscape is that it on all scales creates new spatial connections and relations between all locations on the surface of the earth, and that it is this tremendous artefact that constitutes the space where we live our lives. Since this artificial landscape, moreover, is far from fixed but is continuously altered and expanded, this means that we do not live in a space of absolute location, but in a space of relative location, where these locations change relations and in a relative sense actually move over time. Hence, while we naturally also live our lives in absolute space as described in geography, we more importantly live our lives in relative space as constructed by architecture.
Since we here see how architecture on a most fundamental level creates spatial relation between not only people and things but also locations, we also realize that architecture and urban design create fundamental conditions for most of our social, economic and ecological processes, especially in the highly artificial environments of our cities, and that architecture thereby supports and directs these processes into particular trajectories. And if this is so, we also realize the urgent need to visualize and analyse these conditions so that we can develop knowledge on them that can support future planning and design.
How to do this is not obvious since relations are a most evasive thing which, so to speak, do not exist in themselves but only appear as the effect of other things. Hence, even though all drawings and maps are replete with relations between locations, buildings and people, such geometric tools do not regularly express these relations with any great precision. It is here that architectural and urban morphology have developed tools and methodologies to describe, among many other things, such relations with a high degree of consistency and precision.
Against this background, there is reason for architecture as a scientific discipline and professional field to develop its theoretical foundations when it comes to its central knowledge object, built form and spatial structure, through research and application of knowledge in architectural and urban morphology, to be able to with full force respond to current urban challenges, where architecture and urban design far from being a peripheral fields of knowledge, constitutes parts of the very knowledge core necessary for building a more sustainable future.
The emergence of second form
The above may seem to define architecture as a narrow field primarily concerned with relations and systems effects, which for natural reasons does not appeal to most people involved in the field, especially not practicing architects. That is not what is said, however. The aim here is rather to unveil a most powerful dimension of architectural form that to a surprising degree has been neglected, not least by architectural practice. That is the relation between architectural elements rather than the elements in themselves, in a way shifting from geometry to topology. Certainly, when working with individual buildings architects are often treating such relations carefully, since one realizes that it is essential for both the function and meaning of the building, but on the urban level architects and urban designers are far more careless, despite the fact that the relation between buildings and public spaces in the urban landscape is essential for both their function and meaning in the city.
Moreover, this relational dimension has always been there, since it is inherent to architectural form and far from something that you are free to choose to work with or not. The problem is that it has not been properly captured by regular architectural descriptions and therefore not visualized and made discursive so that one can develop design options for it. However, architecture has developed many forms of description that are highly artificial and far from direct representations of reality, precisely to be able to describe particular architectural properties that one needs to work more closely with. The architectural building plan for instance, does not describe anything that is possible to perceive in reality, but exactly helps visualize architectural properties that are difficult to imagine in one’s head or perceive in reality, such as spatial relation between rooms in a building, but which we acknowledge as essential for architectural performance and therefore need to work closely with. Similarly, it may prove difficult to imagine the distribution of light in a building, why we build three-dimensional models where this can be visualized and tested. What we argue for here are descriptions and models by which we can visualize and analyse relative location in cities so that we can make this fundamental property of urban space, so vital for the function of urban systems, an object of controlled design.
Architectural and urban morphology has developed such descriptive and analytical tools, not least in the research direction known as space syntax. The idea of syntax is here borrowed from linguistics where it concerns the study of the relations of linguistic elements rather than the study of these elements themselves. Hence, space syntax concerns the study of the relation between architecturally defined spatial elements rather than the elements themselves, which is what we find in many other directions of urban morphology, that is topology rather than geometry. But again, the study of such relations does not imply that one studies something outside regular architectural or urban form, but that one discloses, describes and studies a particular but important dimension of such form. We here choose to call regular architectural form as described in typical drawings and plans as “first form”, and the relational form we aim for here as “second form”, where the latter is inherent in the first but far less often visualized and talked about.
This actually implies quite a step forward both for architectural morphology and architectural practice, since it means that this powerful dimension of architectural form no longer is hidden but made explicit and thereby also made discursive, which in extension means that it becomes accessible for conscious design in architectural practice. As we have seen, this have great implications for the ability in such practice to forcefully address the huge challenges currently facing our cities. Actually, it implies a kind of loss of innocence, where we no longer can leave this dimension of architectural form unattended, since we no longer can deny that it is there and needs responsible care. Any architectural artefact that we create, whatever the scale, embodies this dimension of architectural form, why we as scholars or practitioners cannot deny it. To say that I do not work with second form is to say that I do not fully work with architecture.
Figure 3. All plans and maps are geometric representations that simultaneously visualizes a vast number of relations, which is the reason that we often prefer geometry and not texts for descriptions of built form and spatial structure. At the same time, a regular plan or map is very generic in the sense that it describes many relations in a broad manner, rather than a few relations in a precise manner.
This map, in contrast, describes two types of relations with great precision. First, how close each street segment is to every other street segment within a radius of 500m. Closeness is here not measured in meters but topologically as number of street segments. The closer a particular street segment is to other street segments within this radius, the darker brown colour it is given in the map. A regular map or plan would only present the street system as a structure with a particular shape, what we here would call first form, but in this map each segment is given a colour that depicts its relation to all other segments in the street system within a particular radius, thus revealing each elements relation to other elements, what we here call second form.
Interestingly, this description of second form does not only seem to capture the topology of the built city, but also the form of the lived city, in that the areas with street segments in darker brown to a high degree overlap with areas with larger flows of people, greater density of retail and higher levels of rent. What we see is a connection between the architectural form of cities and social and economic processes in cities. In extension of this, we can draw the conclusion that a change of the architectural form will impact the urban processes. That is to say that, through architectural design of the city, we may influence urban life. This is something however, that we first are able to see when we disclose the second form of urban space and not only suffice with its first form.
In a similar manner, the map does not only describe the street network relationally, but also the building structure. We do that by visualizing how much built floor space you are able to access from each building within a radius of 2000m following the street network, where the more floorspace you can access from a building, the darker blue colour it is given. Again, a regular map would only present the foot-print of the buildings (first form), while this map presents each buildings relation to all other buildings within a certain radius (second form), and again, this helps us tie the built city to the lived city. It is quite easy to see how two identical buildings, where the one is close to many other buildings and the second not, will create very different functional conditions for the buildings, despite the fact that they are identical. Again, we see how first form descriptions do not capture this property while second form descriptions do. (Image: Gianna Stavroulaki, The Spatial Morphology Group (SMoG), Chalmers University of Technology).
A reason that this dimension of architectural form often has been neglected is that we have not advanced our expertise either in analysing and building theoretical knowledge about it or developed the skill to proficiently apply it in architectural practice. This is unfortunate since it constitutes one of the most powerful dimensions of architectural form and would be in great demand if we were better at demonstrating and talking about it and in extension develop architectural services based on it. What it addresses is actually something quite extraordinary; the fact that the world is not a series of isolated people and things, even though this often is how it appears due to our regular ways of representing it, not least in language, but that all these people and things are spatially related to each other in complex manners and that these relations more often than not are created, supported and structured by architecture.
How the spatial form of the physical environment is structured and shaped by architecture, not least in cities, is therefore of fundamental importance for many of the most important processes in modern society, and the experts on these relations, moreover, are architects, or should be. It is difficult to see any profession that today sit on a more attractive and valuable area of knowledge and set of skills that it can offer the world. However, to realise that potential demands that we start to visualize, analyse and skilfully apply the full range of architectural form – what we may see, is the emergence of second form.