NEVER ACCORDING TO PLAN
This post is a petition for a more comprehensive approach to city design.
It is the first in a series that will chart how we begin to rewrite the rules of our studio.
Imagine a place that is important to you.
You can do this now. Close your eyes for a moment, and picture it.
Wherever you thought of, I'm guessing you didn't see it as a scale plan, but as a collection of images and experiences, standing upright and alive with meaning.
Perhaps you imagined picking something up in that landscape, some material fragment of place, precious and partial, beautiful and broken. You may have felt a tangle of emotions and memories, too complex to untwine. We experience places through our senses and our feelings, but, this isn't how we discuss place throughout the formal design process. If we don't actively engage meaning through city design how do we know it is there? If we aren't creating the conditions for meaning to thrive, we will find ourselves in a city that is, in short, meaningless.
Every city is not one place, but two.
The first city, The City of Knowledge, dominates every formal city design conversation; it is the facts of the matter. It populates technocratic discourse and occupies temporal architectural space. It is formal, dependable, and always just as you left it, sitting squarely in cells in spreadsheets or inked out confidently on a plan. This city is tangible; it can be carved up, bought, sold, built, and rebuilt. This city is described in detail by the RIBA plan of work. Designers have come to know the City of Knowledge so well that it is easy to forget that it is just one-half of a whole.
When we design a place with only The City of Knowledge as a guide, it becomes clear that something is missing; these are sober, rational, and static streetscapes, difficult to form a relationship with. They present as whole, but we experience them as partial and incomplete. These places are indifferent to you, unaffected by seasons, unwavering. This is because The City of Knowledge is a dead thing; it is the stage, not the bodies speaking on it, the instrument, not the song, the map, not the territory.
The second city is The City of Meaning.
This city wants to speak with us, but not yet. First, we must earn back its trust. In a systemic preoccupation with efficiency, this second city has been shunned by formal urban practices and has gone into exile. It is living, so it will not show up in dead processes, and it won't come knocking on the door of siloed specialists withdrawn from the world.
Every citizen knows the City of Meaning; when we use the word 'meaning' we are describing our instinctive sense of belonging in the world, that palpable feeling of connectedness and spirit we sometimes experience in the presence of community and culture. We all know this feeling, but bringing it into the open, holding it in front of us, describing it, and designing with it is a different matter altogether. It is always on the tip of your tongue, it is always moving quickly, and it is likely to disappear if you look straight at it. Meaning is subjective and never stops moving, so we must learn its
dance.
Our studio, Standard Practice, has spent the last decade learning in public. We’ve learned through creating city interventions and experiments which encourage active citizenship and participation with place. We have been driven on by the belief that the future relies on deeper collaboration between people and other people, people and places, and people and the rest of the living world. But has our work been meaningful?
Well, we have witnessed meaning in the work.
It arrives in projects between people, and in the things they make, but it is always as a visitor, it doesn’t set up residence. This is because the work we have done, involving people as collaborators in their city, only comes into play after all the important decisions about a place have been made, by city designers working in near perfect isolation. Designers working with The City of Knowledge. Designers working with one arm tied behind their backs. They know what a city is, but they have almost no way of speaking with meaning. Meaning exists through its relationship to others, in isolation it dies. If we do not open a dialogue with it, it simply cannot exist.
Many City Designers, including ourselves, have tried to bring citizens to work upon The City of Knowledge in a hope to construct places for meaning to dwell. Every time we attempt this the process has proven to be too technical, too abstract, too clinical and, frankly, too dead to accept meaningful input from citizens. This is grim work, the work of Frankenstein, stood around a table handling dead parts and hoping for life.
We’ve now realised that we’ve got this the wrong way around all along.
We shouldn’t be bringing life into a dead process.
We should be bringing a dead process to life.
Planners, architects and urban designers must venture out to meet meaning where it is, between people, in the stunning complexity, contradictions and messiness that make up the lived experience of all citizens. If you want to design a city you are going to need to lace up your boots and you’re going to want to get amongst it.
We know The City of Meaning is somewhere close by; we have glimpsed it slantwards in our wilder moments. And so, we plan to build a home for The City of Meaning in the middle of our city, and we plan to leave the door open.
We have taken a lease on a room that is far too big for our small team, this is because we are inviting you to join us. We are opening our design practice to everybody, every day of the week. This is us putting our money where our mouth is. In this new studio we can gather a hundred people together, and we have arranged it in a way that we hope will encourage meaning to slip quietly in amongst us and make its presence felt. Every object, chair, table and stool, will be made with us by citizens; magical objects to re-enchant the city.
This place might not look like a typical City Design Studio - there will be no banks of desks and screens, no meeting rooms - but instead a large open space, big enough to allow 100 people to gather together and arranged to allow meaning to slip quietly in amongst us. We think this is the sort of City Design Studio that the city needs.
Design, by its definition, explores what does not exist but which might come into being – but often, it does this in a fixed way, from a single perspective. This studio
will allow us to reframe the imagining of the city, from the predominantly non-verbal work of architects and designers to more discursive modes of design. We aren’t interested in simply describing what the city is or might be, but rather sharing how the city feels or might feel.
In this studio we will lift ideas up and out of plan, allowing them to move between people, ideas shaped and reshaped as they go. As we do so we will work to find meaning, bring it into the open, and let it speak. This work will present architects, planners and urban designers with a second brief, a brief from The City of Meaning, to overlay upon the City of Knowledge.
If we bring The City of Meaning to rest down upon The City of Knowledge, we can witness the whole city, a city of understanding. A city both abstract and concrete, dead and alive, rational and emotional, built and lived. Not simplifying the city, not rationalising it, not abstracting it, but witnessing it in its totality, living it, and cultivating meaning together.
We are fascinated with the idea of a meaningful city because we are in love with the idea of occupying a meaningful world. The city is our primary field of investigation because it represents a dense overlapping of the stuff of life, the ideas, myths and stories that make up our existence. If we can begin to see meaning in the city we can begin to see meaning in everything we do as people. The hunting party for meaning is growing; we are far from alone.
As the handrails of the 20th Century worldview rust away, we see people beginning to wander off the well-trodden path, pulled along by feelings awaiting articulation.
They are in the hinterlands of the rational world, hoping to find a place to breathe deeply and care fully. We are among these wanderers, exploring ways to re-see the world around us and feel fully alive in the city we live in.
We know there is something wilder, more whole, and less rational just out of view. This studio is a home for all of these people and all of these conversations. We believe that a city of reciprocity, connectedness and meaning is not only possible, it is coming.
Thank you for reading this first dispatch from Standard Practice.
So far these words are just an idea, but we read somewhere that it is our duty to speak loudly and frequently on behalf of the future we want to occupy, because you can’t manifest what you don’t share. This document is us doing just that.
If anything here resonates with you please don't hesitate to get in touch.
Anticipate Dispatch Two soon.
SP
