Understanding the city

In the past, most attempts to understand the city scientifically have not seen the city’smost obvious network - its street network – as being of scientific relevance or interest.But it is the street network that links the aggregations of buildings into a single system, it is what you see when you look down on a city, and it is what you navigate when youwalk or drive in a city. In all these senses, the street network seems to be the commonground between the real space of the city and our experience of it. They say something about how cities are structured spatially, how they work, and how they grow and change.

Networks of space have, in recent years, brought to light a fundamental link between thestructure and functioning of cities: that the configuration of the network is the primary shaper of the pattern of movement. In shaping movement, it alsoshapes the patterns of human co-presence - and of course co-absence – that seems to be the key to our sense that good cities are human and social things as well as physicalthings. This is a far reaching proposition, and, if true, as increasing evidence suggests itis, it has far reaching implication for how we think about cities and design them. Thelarge scale architecture of city space, which has been neglected for decades, mattersmuch more than we thought to the life of the city and how it comes into existence.In principle, this idea is not really new. Most designers believe that we can manipulatespace to create the emergent human patterns that are the source of our sense that cities are civilised, safe and pleasurable.

People make trips because the shops are there. But it is maybe not fundamental. Maybe the space network itself, shapes movement, then the shops are where they are because they are following the patterns of movement already created by the network. So we can not start with attraction if we want to understand this city. We should start with the network which creates the pattern of attraction. So the network view of the city is also a paradigm change. It puts everything in the city in a different order. Once we understand the relation between the network configuration and movement, we can begin to creating a networks of centres and sub-centres. This is the nature of the organic city which evolves over tens or hun-dreds of yearsto form the seamless web of busy and quiet places, with everything seem-ing to be in the right place, the organic city. How local places arise in cities depends as much on how it is embedded in its larger scale context as in its intrinsic properties. In fact, this is mabyetrue of space in general, and that the local-global relation has featured too little in our attempts to reproduce the excellencies of cities through design.

Malmø 2009

Malmö as fragmented city

Malmö global structures

Malmö high density city

Malmö local structures

City center Inner cityOuter city Rural area

Malmö

City zones

Buildings and the city of Malmø exist for us in two ways: as the physicalforms that we build and see, and as the spaces that we use and movethrough.

So what is space:

The first is that we have to learn to think of space not as the background to human activity, as we think of it as the background to objects, but as an aspect of everything human beings do, in the sense that moving through space,interacting with other people in space, or even just seeing ambient space from a point in it have a natural and necessary spatial geometry: movement is essentially a linear activity, interaction requires a convex space in which all points can see all others, from any pointin space we see a variably shaped visual field, and it is by accumulatingthese as we move through the complex patterns of space we find in buildings and cities that we somehow build an enduring picture of the pattern of space as a whole. This describes some aspect of how we use or experience space,and for this reason how buildings and cities are organised in terms of these geometric ideas is a vital aspect of how we create them, use them and understand them. For example, space in cities is for the most part linear – streets, boulevards, avenues, alleys and so on are all linear concepts - with occasional convex elements we call squares or public open spaces. So the language of city space is written in this geometric language reflecting human behaviour and experience.

Shoving main infrastructure inn and out of Malmø city. These human struktures makes spaces and human activity/movement. But creates also big barriers when it comes to social interaction between people in Malmø.

By filling these spaces, we see that the spaces are growing as the distance to the city-senter increase. This indicate different human activities in diffrent spaces. That means that different kind of people are attracted to their “ favor-ite space”, or because of financial reasons. This means spaces of segregation

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3Studying the lines of the different zones in the city of Malmö ( Zone 1 - city center. Zone 2 - inner city. Zone 3 - outer city).

Going in to the different spaces

Shorter lines. Making more crosses.

Longer lines. Making fewer crosses.

Longest lines. Making less crosses

Different zones in the city have different line structures. Zone 1 -city center have short lines with many crosses. Creating an urban feeling in dense spaces. The different lines in the city makes different spaces, meaning different urban feelings. The different structures zones 1,2 and 3 makes little connections to the global structures. The local lines and the global lines are not working together. Few interesting meeting points. The spaces are looking into itself and not interacting with other spaces. Makes city development difficult. Need to find new structures.

Macro - city

Micro - biology

Like the micro organism in water form a pattern of lines, the city forms new lines by looking for alternative streets/routes in the purpose of braking up different spaces/ar-eas. In this way new patterns can be build, and the social interaction can develop.

Space shapes movement

The problem in Malmø is that all the main streets ( global streets ) is occupied with car traffic. This streets take you directly from the city center and out in the rural area. At the same time the main streets ( because of the heavily traffic) makes barriers to the different city spaces. This leads to segregation and different social zones in the city. By locking for alternative spaces we can brake down these barriers between these physical and social spaces. Once we have this line network, we can calculate, say, the integration value of each line in relation to all others, and color up as usual. The global structures ( long lines) are given the colors red, yellow and orange. The local structures are given the colors pink, blue and purple. When ever tree colors mets in the network ( one global structure and two local structures) we mark a connection point ( green circle) . A new interesting space will then occur. And the the lines between the green circles vill guide us through the city in new way. These green circle can be new green structures inn the city or new social interactions spaces. The lines between the green circles will brace down the global structure, By this a urban development of Malmø can develop in an including way in all the different spaces.

People

Spaces

New spaces

People move inn lines Interact in segregated space Interact in new visual fieldsconnecting different lines and making new spaces for interac-tion among different people in Malmø

Lines are finding new connectionsWhere the different lines (streets) meets ( valued by color) new interesting spaces are made

The new local connections are braking down the old global structures

Local structures (lines) are making new meeting ( green) spaces.

Braking the barrier of the Ring -road ( global structure)

The new green spaces in the city meeting water ( ponds) in the rural area. Together they make a new city strukture

New ecological development area

Breaking trough the global structure ( Ring road )

To bee continue........