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AULA MEETING OF MINDS
WORKSHOP 2: SPACE |
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Networked realities: SPACE AS ENABLER AND
CONSTRAINT OF SOCIAL INTERACTION
Introduction to Workshop 2: Space Aula Meeting of Minds Helsinki, Saturday 15 September 2001 13:30-16:30 ”We shape the things we build. Thereafter, they shape
us.” - Sir Winston
Churchill This workshop aims to identify mechanisms by which communication
technology changes the way that physical space is used and designed. Material
environments are shaped by a multitude of forces, many of them social. How are
current shifts in technology and society affecting the way we build cities,
live in them and work in them? Specific topics for further discussion include:
I recommend reading two texts relating to the subject. The first text is
by the distinguished urban sociologist Saskia Sassen. The second one is a text
of my own. If you have more related material, feel free to email it to to the
other participants of the workshop. Saskia Sassen (1999): “The
Intersection Between Actual and Digital Space”. Excerpt from The Global City:
Time and Space. Cities on the Move 7. Helsinki: Kiasma Tuomas Toivonen (2001):
“Notes on the General Urban Condition”. Excerpt from Aula: Spaces for Social Networking. Concept Development and
Building a Test Platform in Central Helsinki, submitted as Final Thesis Report
for Helsinki University of Technology, Department of Architecture Best regards, Tuomas Toivonen TUOMAS TOIVONEN:
NOTES ON THE GENERAL URBAN CONDITION Cities are catalysts. The
political, cultural, economic, criminal and social domains are all intensified
in the urban condition. Urban centers act as magnets, attracting and activating
people, goods and capital. This intensification and attempts to control it are
prime motors of urban change. Home The home has grown separate from the city. In becoming more private, the
home has become a personal space offering isolation and contrast to the
anonymous and uncontrollable. This personalisation has changed the role of the
home as a social meeting space. Smaller and smaller households inhabit larger
and larger apartments–decreasing the population density and increasing the
total amount of private space. The city grows vaguely urban on a macroscale yet
intensely private on a microscale. It is becoming rare to be able to knock at
someones front door without penetrating layers of protection built with security
codes, intercoms or slow driving over speedbumps in low-density housing areas. Workplace The workplace has become more and more segregated. Due to increasing specialisation,
efficiency and security reasons, employees end up meeting less and less people
outside their own organisation and discipline. For the same reasons, the workplace has started encroaching
the private realm of its employees through company-arranged activities:
training, fitness, entertainment, holidays, even matchmaking. Privatised workspace
starts with elaborate information/security desks and check-in procedures,
thrives in the suburban detachment of relocated offices and extends to the
VIP-balconies of the new stadiums. Third place Third places are not the home or the workplace. They are not public, but
their privatisation is sensitive. Third places are designed to appeal to a
target group. They profile identity, exclusivity, location and function to get
their demographic. Third places are often places of meeting, but this meeting
is enabled through consuming. They create social networks and tap into them for
business. In bars and cafes it seems that the strength of the networks
maintained follow an inverse proportionality to the perceived publicness of the
place. The more public a third place is, the weaker its relationship is to its
users. Identity is a tool for creating a maximum intensity of shared values
within the target group - the stronger the identity, the stronger the cohesion
within the networks created. City The general intensification of the city fuels the shifting of urban
space towards more intense forms of consumerism. Urban space has become heavily
conditioned: ”you stay, you pay”. Public is no longer free, because free has
become too expensive. The last public institutions (educational, religious,
civic) are struggling as they are forced to adapt to the market reality of
profit responsibility. There are two distinctly different types of urban space
emerging: I. New total environments, vast interiors engineered to make you consume
more, rendering pale the outside world and its imperfect complexity. These
conditioned zones create sharp or thick edges that try to isolate the
constructed inner logic and its values from the surrounding context. Centers of
shopping-gravity, like Kämp, Stockmann, Iso-Omena and Ikea, have impact on the
city on a metropolitan scale. II. The non-place, an endless compilation of in-betweens. These leftover
spaces are the gray matter that surrounds pockets of specificity. Edged between
parts allergic to its uncontrolled nature, the leftover space unites them with
harsh insensitivity of situation. These spaces are streets, squares, parking
lots, roadsides–the logistical and infrastructural side products of urbanism. Personal City The city can be regarded as a layering of personal realities over a
public terrain dominated by escalating consumerism. While the public realm has
grown either heavily controlled or uncontrollable, developments in technology
have extended personal space and control into the city. The private car, the
credit card and the mobile phone have all had tremendous impact on the way
people move, consume and communicate.
Technological progress enables shifts and changes in the ways people
live, work, meet and love. These shifts also affect the way society organises
itself and cities are built and used. Social capital and cross-boundary networks This project deals with the accumulation of capital –but not of capital
in the economic sense, but social capital: The level, quality, density and strength
of the networks that link people together. Social capital accumulates in the nodes of networks allowing
the transfer of trust and information. On a socially and culturally segmented
field, individuals with most cross-boundary links possess the most social
capital. Cross-disciplinary
connections allow for new ideas and innovations to be proliferated and adapted
into new fertile soil. Innovations emerge on the edges of disciplines, where
boundaries are blurred and different ways of thinking collide and merge. << Back to Workshops introduction
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