2014/1 ‒ Producing Places

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The City—A Popular Assembly
Schwarte, Ludger (2014) , S. 73-83
The architecture of cities provides infrastructures for thousands of people.Yet if it seems that the primary task of this architecture is to make the administration of many people, their living together, their work, their leisure, possible on a rational and dense basis, we ought not oversee that the fulfillment of these functions is not a sufficient condition of what makes a city. Important characteristics of urbanity rather enable the meeting of a multitude of people. Cities count among the conditions for social events insofar as they assemble. In my paper, I propose to analyze this architectural condition as the decisive difference between »Being With« in contrast to just »Being next to«.
The Rules of Attraction: Urban Design, City Films, and Movement Studies
Frahm, Laura (2014) , S. 85-99
William H.Whyte’s instructional film The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1979), which chronicles the findings of his decade-long study of people’s behavior in small urban spaces in New York City in the 1970s, offers a precise analysis of the rules of attraction that draw people into places and that keep them attached. By combining direct observation with complex technical arrangements and new forms of movement studies, Whyte’s study advocates a quintessentially process-oriented understanding of ‘placemaking’ that shaped a new bottom-up approach to urban design in the 1970s.