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dere-street.com
a variety of things, some useful. |
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dere-street.com
a variety of things, some useful. |
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Buildings cannot survive without streets; they indicate one another, and serve on another. The street encompasses a fundamental principle of space… Far from being another bland component of the city, the street is its most essential and most ambiguous spatial unity… the street is not just narrative, but an open framework for the drama of everyday life (Coates, 1988: p. 107).
The street, that most ephemeral yet universal of urban spaces, remains arguably one of the most important, the most contentious, and yet least understood of all the places that make up the city. The street is one of the fundamental spatial metaphors, the city’s "most essential and most ambiguous spatial unit", representing the model for "the play between public and private, static and mobile, restraint and release" (Coates, 1988: p. 107). The growth of an urban public culture is synonymous with the development of "cultures of the streets" (Howell, 1993; Zukin, 1995: p. 189), where "everyday street-life nourished modern experiences and values" (Dear, 1995: p. 36; see also Jacobs, 1961), and where the street is key to understanding the changing urban experience (de Certeau, 1984; Coates, 1988). From the grid of city streets (Sennett, 1990) to the surveillance cameras that watch us (Fyfe and Bannister, 1996) to the postmodern Fantasy City of spectacle (Hannigan, 1998) to the rationing of services by post-code, the street imposes its particular structures upon us.
Despite its centrality, the street has not been a focus of analysis for many geographers. This is not to say that the street has no importance: it is central to the work of Jacobs (1961), Zukin (1995) and Whyte (1980; 1988). The position of the street within the literature is somewhat problematic: it lies below the wider sweeping analyses of the city, yet above that of the site (Jackson and Thrift, 1995); somewhat to the side of analyses of the mall (Bunce, 1983; Shields, 1989) and the festival market (Boyer, 1992; Goss, 1996); and somewhat tangential even to discussions of urbanity (Madani-Pour, 1996).
More to the point, the street represents the confluence of a multiplicity of implicit and often highly contradictory roles within current urban thought. From the liminal territory of the postmodern flâneur (Shields, 1991), to the non-space of Corbusier’s ‘machine for traffic’, to the site of alienation and placelessness articulated through corporate architecture and the exclusionary ‘blank wall’ of the apocalyptic urbanism of Whyte (1988) and Davis (1992), to the internalised streets of the mall (Goss, 1993) and the site of visions of local and authentic urbanism (Jacobs, 1961; Francaviglia, 1996; Marcuse, 2000), the street has become something of a cipher, profoundly contradictory, endlessly mutating, an implicit container, a site where other actions, processes and emotions occur.
Space itself remains a curiously under-explored topic of geographic curiosity… space prevails as a largely taken-for-granted concept (Strohmayer, 1998: p. 106).
Historically speaking, Agnew has argued that concepts of community, society, class and capital have dominated theory in the social sciences to the extent that "thinking and talking in terms of place has been largely impossible" (Agnew, 1989: p. 9). This has been exacerbated by the difficulties inherent in the terms themselves, given the difficulties in defining and abstracting them (Agnew, 1989; Madani-Pour, 1996), and their role in wider arguments about culture (Ley, 1989: p. 45).
The attempt to ‘bring space back in’ to the wider field of social theory, to re-establish it as a counterpoint to emphases on time, has been a priority of geographic thought since the late 80s. As Entrikin argued at the emergence of this spatial turn, "human experience is always rooted in place. For some geographers this represents a relatively recent interest." (Entrikin, 1989: p. 41; Gregory, 1989). Soja was one of a series of geographers who repeat Foucault’s famous dictum "Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the un-dialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic" (1989: p. 119).
society is necessarily constructed spatially, and that fact – the spatial organisation of society – makes a difference to how it works (Massey, 1994: p. 254).
The constitution of society is spatial and temporal, social existence is made concrete in geography and history (Soja, 1989: p. 127).
Central to debates on space and place are questions of scale. Recognition of ‘the scale problem in human geography’ (Watson, 1978) was twinned to the question of locale and the local, with much of the grand spatial thinking in geography ignoring "the particularities of content and context" in the quest for wider meta-narratives and understandings (Ley, 1989: p. 55; see also Davis, 1985; and Gottdiener, 1995) where the local "has been for too long neglected by an over-centralised, dominating and exclusive modernist culture" (Cooke, 1988: p. 114-5; cf. Robins, 1993). Massey (1994: p. 130-1) in particular has argued for the study of local places, arguing that the particular history of particular places is important, as their character is shaped and in turn shapes the wider forces acting upon them.
Despite the recognition of the essential role that the spatial plays, as a concept space is increasingly recognised as problematic (Rose, 1993: p. 70). While there is a widespread inference that the concept is "free from any problems or contradictions, as if we all agreed what space means" (Madani-Pour, 1996: p. 331-2; see also Soja, 1989), the contrast between ‘absolute’ ( as "clearly distinct, real and objective space") and ‘relative’ ("perceptual and socially produced") definitions of space reveals a more fragmented spatial. Similarly, Merrifield (1997: p. 418) argues that there are essentially two series of general perspectives on urban space: those which analyse it in terms of processes, and those that focus on the experience of place. Synthesising the two metaphors is difficult, for each perspective typically marginalises the other.
Traditional geographic studies of the changing urban landscape (e. g. Conzen and Whitehand, 1981; Whitehand, 1992) have focused on changes to the physical fabric of the city itself, analysing change through the study of changing ownership patterns, redevelopment and through the roles of architects and builders in shaping the landscape. With the emergence of postmodern discourses, this approach has continued, albeit in a more nuanced yet highly ideological form that attempts to relate broader patterns of restructuring to changes in the landscape (Soja, 1989; Jameson, 1991). This is often expressed through analyses of particular buildings as broader signifiers of change and restructuring, (e.g. Cooke (1990) on the AT&T Building in Manhattan, Jameson (1984), Davis (1985) and Whyte (1988) on the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles) in preference to more idiographic approaches (Goss, 1988).
The focus of this ‘spatial turn’ is however highly contested, with many arguing that the literature has privileged particular types of spaces. Urban histories have often been articulated through what Hayden describes as a "landmark policy" (or ‘city biography’) which emphasises the creation of urban structure while marginalising the role of "ordinary buildings as part of public history" (Hayden, 1995: p. 3). Other forms of spatial analyses suffer from similar flaws: much of the recent consumption literature has focused on the role of the mall (Gregson and Crewe, 1994; Crewe and Lowe, 1995), in preference to the more ‘mundane’ landscapes of the high street (Morris, 1988: p. 202; Zukin, 1995: p. 191), while analyses of leisure have often focused on the creation of large-scale and corporate spectacles (Hannigan, 1998; Goss, 1999) in preference to the more local and disorganised street.
From Conzen in the 1930s (1981) to Harvey (1989a), Soja (1996) and Dear (2000) today, urban change has been one of the mainstays of geographical research: particularly dominating postmodern writings. But what is change? This key question underlies all analyses, for it contextualises much and reveals perceptions of place that otherwise remain highly implicit. The dominant analyses of change and restructuring in the literature revolve around varied aspects of the modern/postmodern transition (Harvey, 1989a; Zukin, 1992), although these analyses are not without criticism (Davis, 1985; Gottdiener, 1995; Thrift, 1997). These analyses revolve around meta-narratives of change that attempt to visualise coherent patterns of social change across nations and economic systems.
Research focusing on local change, in particular how local landscapes are evolving, is more rare. It is often subordinate to attempts to either identify local aspects of broader change (De Oliver, 1996; although attempts to specifically link the local with broader changes have come under significant criticism, see Massey, 1994); to identify the direction of local change (Crewe, 1994); or to understand the experience of the street, including people’s perceptions and iconographies of the street (Lynch, 1960; de Certeau, 1984; Sennett, 1990).
Sack has argued that "places historically have been thought of as more or less fixed" (1992: p. 104), in what Madani-Pour (1996: p. 348) characterises as a vision of place that is "timeless and bounded, with a singular, fixed, and unproblematic, authentic identity" (see also Strohmayer, 1998). In particular, there is a considerable tendency to infer stable readings of places once built: they then assume a fixed identity (the high street, the mall, Disneyland) that is both significantly detached from and consciously resisting the reality of continued change and evolution (Morris, 1988). Practice has shown that studying the detail of how landscapes are changing is difficult and invariably quantitative: many data sources only provide information on structural changes (Foley and Hutchinson, 1994) while other more focused data sources are rarely used (Rideout, 1993; Rowley, 1984). The result is an inference in much of the literature that ‘urban change’ is synonymous with architectural change, which is synonymous with landscape change (Whitehand, 1992). Thus the street is again marginalised.
The production of capitalist spatiality, however, is no once-and-for-all event (Soja, 1989: p. 129).
But we know that places change, evolve, mutate. How much do they have to change before we take notice? Or do we prioritise particular types of change? Gottdiener (1995: p. 132) argues that many postmodern authors deal with change in the most superficial way, providing a curious combination of nomothetic and ideographic analyses that turn "a tendency into a universal semanticisation of the built environment". Such perspectives privilege change through attempts to locate changing landscapes within the wider theoretical landscape, while articulating particular visions of change, most noticeably in the ‘transition’ from modern to postmodern landscapes (Davis, 1985).
It is difficult to analyse changes in landscape without analysing landscape itself. While there is a noticeable interest in the semiotics of landscape, of particular buildings, and of the activities that happen within landscapes (particularly consumption and the joys of spectacle Crouch, 1998) these analyses tend to situate landscape as a wider container within which other things happen – the container itself is made incidental.
The use of such abstracted concepts of change invariably skews our understanding of the true nature and impact of change (Thrift, 1997). In particular, such monolithic visions of substantive change ignore the constant and repeated changes of building occupants and uses within the landscape: while the landscape is constantly changing, it is not necessarily being constantly rebuilt.
This thesis contextualises questions of change by not focusing on change per se, but on analysing the street as an explicitly modernist phenomenon: a site shaped by the contradictions of modernity. This perspective takes Berman’s (1982) definition of the experience of modernity (the experience of the constant tension between stability and constant change) and specifically extends this tension to analyses of place. Place then is seen neither as static and unchanging, nor as constantly changing, but as an unstable mixture of the two.
this articulation of places as an unstable and highly problematic site of contradictions has its roots in the most radical message of modernity (Oakes, 1997: p. 525)
This vision of the modern street allows us to contextualise change by visualising the tension between the new and the old, allowing for a greater appreciation both of how landscape changes and of how it remains stable. This allows the visualisation of the street in transition, and allows us to examine how place is constructed and reconstructed, and provides an opportunity for an appreciation of the transitory and ephemeral nature of the reality of urban change.
Through this device, the analysis explicitly links visions of space and time, and by combining the two metaphors enables the construction of a better understanding of landscapes of modernity that reflect "The presence of the past in a present that supersedes it but still lays claim to it" (Augé, 1995: p. 75-7; see also Madani-Pour, 1996). This enables us to situate the streets’ "permanent impermanence" (Gregory, 1994: p. 215; cf. Langman, 1992: p. 46) within what is essentially a historical approach to the present (Driver, 1988: p. 497).
we become more conscious of modernity when the places we occupy in our daily lives are the very loci of the contradictions of modernity (Sack, 1992: p. 5).
This thesis uses this conceptual framework to examine the changing urban street, particularly the street of consumption. While it has been widely recognised that consumption is to a large degree articulated through place and that it is one of the most significant place-building processes (Sack, 1988; Crewe and Lowe, 1995), the lack of work on the nature and change of the local landscape of the street represents one of the great lacunae in the literature (Crewe, 1994; Hayden, 1995).
This research develops a detailed history of two neighbourhoods in Edinburgh, by combining the data from 17 annual surveys taken between January 1978 and November 1994 of some 1400 sites, representing approximately 345,000 m2 of floor space into a large database which is then used to develop clear understanding of the change, relative stability, and slow overall evolution of the local street. While the study area does include two relatively small shopping malls (representing ~7% of all sites), it otherwise avoids the ‘formalised’ environments of the mall and the festival setting and avoids "the tyranny of the single site" (Jackson and Thrift, 1995: p. 211; see also Gregson and Crewe, 1994), by analysing over 16km of street frontage in two neighbourhoods that serve central Edinburgh.
In looking at the histories of local streets, this research consciously examines what Morris describes as "the everyday… the supposedly un- or non-experimental" (Morris, 1988: p. 202; see also Hayden, 1995; Zukin, 1995: p. 190-1). It reflects the calls for a "historical geography of consumption" (Jackson and Thrift, 1995: p. 229) and for "geographies of consumption and identity ‘on the ground’" (Crewe and Lowe, 1995: p. 1877). It takes as fundamental Massey’s argument that we need to study the particular history of particular places as their character is not only shaped by wider forces but stamps "its own imprint on those wider processes" (Massey, 1994: p. 131). It begins the process of addressing the fundamental tension between our (wider) knowledge of how society is changing and our relative lack of knowledge of how the street is changing. The aim of this thesis is to provide a history of these spaces, and to chart their evolution.
This thesis has one methodological and three theoretical objectives. It will examine the suitability of Goad maps as data sources for urban research, and use the material generated from a collation of 34 of these maps to examine the particular local street history of two study areas. This site data will be analysed to develop a greater understanding of how the local street is changing and to what degree it remains a relatively stable entity. This material will be used to examine the local evidence of landscape changes due to increased levels of urban homogenisation and globalisation, and to study the changing role of leisure within the streetscape.
Numerous data sources exist for the study of the city, fewer provide site level data, even fewer can be cross-referenced into a historical record, and fewer still are accessible in any volume. Many sources rely upon the goodwill of various local and national governmental agencies to facilitate access to meaningful amounts of data (Rideout, 1993; Lees, 1994). By contrast, the Goad maps are relatively accessible, and offer pseudo-annual site-level coverage of a large number of urban areas . While their suitability as a resource for urban studies has been previously identified (Rowley, 1984; Rowley, 1985), there is little evidence of their use in the geographic literature. This research will enable an analysis of the usability and potential of this very accessible source of current and historical urban data.
Discourses of change, transition and restructuring dominate considerable segments of the geographic literature. While many of the broader trends within change are widely recognised (Glennie and Thrift, 1993), the actual detail of change and the applicability of wider discourses of change to particular local experiences is widely overlooked, despite its importance (Sayer, 1989; Massey, 1994; Hayden, 1995; Stallabrass, 1996). While Berman in particular (1982; see also Oakes, 1997) has argued that the modern experience is characterised by the tension between change and stability, analyses invariably prioritise the impact of change over equally important questions of stability (Gottdiener, 1995).
This research examines multiple definitions of ‘change’, arguing that while ‘change’ appears to be a relatively straightforward conceptual device, the reality of the street indicates that ‘change’ is often highly dependent upon the definitions, methods and scales that are used in the analysis. A number of factors influencing the perception of change are analysed, including the overall rates of landscape change, the role of vacancies, and the role of high-change sites. This focus on change is further contextualised by an analysis of the stability of the street, where the reality of stability is recognised to be considerably more complex than inferences of ‘stability as the antithesis of change’. Profiles of the street reveal a constantly mutating phenomenon underpinned by highly stable foundations. Analysis indicates that a thorough understanding of stability adds considerable complexity and detail to discourses of change.
Homogenisation and globalisation discourses are widely recognised and are thoroughly embedded within the geographic and wider literatures (Baudrillard, 1988; Harvey, 1989a; Jameson, 1991), although their local veracity has come under increasing question (Massey, 1994; Crewe and Lowe, 1995; Jackson and Thrift, 1995). Explicit definitions/characterisations of these processes that can be used as a basis for local analyses are rather more rare. This research analyses several different definitions of globalisation and homogenisation whose analysis is made possible by the construction of a site-level database of occupants and uses, and questions the evidence supporting the correlation between wider discourses of economic restructuring and the reality of the local experience. In particular, indicators of levels of homogeneity are presented which allow the comparison of levels of homogeneity within the bounds of the two study areas, and between the dataset and national and international economic spheres. The assumption of rising levels of homogeneity is analysed in the light of the changing makeup of the urban streetscape, as is the presence/emergence of landscapes of ‘global capitalism’ as represented by the presence in the landscape of national and international chains and brands.
The transition towards a more leisure-based economy is widely recognised (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990; Hannigan, 1998; Hughes, 1999). This research examines exactly how leisure provision in the street is changing, and whether distinct patterns of leisure change can be identified within the wider streetscapes. It examines leisure change in terms of the changing concentrations of leisure provision, and examines in detail the profiles of leisure uses which distinguish particular geographical areas. It questions the accepted vision of how leisure is changing, and examines in detail the shifts in particular leisure uses and whether particular forms of leisure provision are becoming common elements of the wider streetscape.
Debates over modernism and the nature of a putative transition to postmodernism have been central to the recent work of cultural and urban geographers. This chapter charts the respective emergence of modernism, urban modernism, postmodernism and postmodern urbanism, focusing in particular on visions of the street, and the themes of control, spectacle, consumption and authenticity that are implicit within these perspectives. Discourses of modernism and postmodernism are shown to be highly fractured and problematic, full of internal tensions and contradictions. This equally applies to the numerous and contradictory readings of the urban and the street.
The geographical literature on consumption has shifted over the last decade from an interest in analyses of new forms of retail development to wider conceptions of the process of consumption, focusing both on the social roles within consumption and on the relationship between consumption practices and place building. While the importance of place is repeatedly emphasised in the literature, there is a simultaneous emphasis upon the role of spectacle and upon private consumption environments (particularly the mall). The role of landscape within consumption processes is analysed, and calls for the study of ‘alternative’ landscapes of consumption are linked to the exploration of the role of the street as a consumption environment.
This chapter examines the variety of available urban data sources that could be used to construct site-level histories of the street, before detailing the choice of the Goad material as the study’s data source. The issues involved in transcribing the data from the 34 source maps are explained, as are the particular solutions that were developed during the process to facilitate the transcription and verification of the site data. This is followed by an explanation of the occupant and use classification strategies that were developed during the generation of the database in preparation for the subsequent analyses.
Having selected two study areas, this chapter provides a wider background to the two regions, including a brief synopsis of the history of the areas, before providing a more detailed history of the period under examination. Primary focus is given to the role of the local Council and institutions that promote regeneration and shape economic and landscape development within the study areas.
Chapter 6 begins by questioning the concept of change, and proposing a number of different definitions of change whose analysis is supported by the dataset. These include examining overall and more local rates of change, the types of changes in occupant and site use, broad/sectoral shifts in site uses, and the role of vacancies and constantly changing sites as indicators of change.
Aspects of the ‘historical’ street are evaluated to deepen the understanding of the nature of change and its relationship to the persistent street, with particular attention focusing on several differing definitions of stability, particularly the numbers of occupants and uses each site has had. A cumulative profile of the street is constructed, enabling a more contextual analysis of change that highlights the underlying stability of the street. Special attention is paid to the final year in the study period, including analyses of those sites that are unchanged throughout the length of the study period.
The question of homogeneity is broached by examining the variations in types of site uses and in numbers of distinct site uses both within the two study regions and within smaller geographic areas within these areas. The use of chain sites and multiples as indicators of homogeneity is examined in the following chapter.
Chapter 7 builds on the analyses of the preceding chapter by focusing on three broad areas of change: changing leisure uses, changing service uses and the changing roles of chains and multiples in the urban landscape. The assumption of a transition towards a more leisure-based economy is examined, with a focus on shifts in leisure uses and changing levels of concentration of leisure services. Similar assumptions about the increasing importance of services are analysed, with a particular emphasis upon shifts in the provision of white-collar services, although the usefulness of the data source for this type of street analysis is questioned.
The changing distribution and role of chain sites within the study areas are examined as an indicator of changing levels of homogeneity. Analyses are developed focusing on the level of concentration of these sites within the two study regions, and using this data to infer levels of similarity between the study areas and the wider economic landscape. The role of occupants with multiple sites within the regions is examined as an indicator of relative levels of homogeneity within the two study areas. Excluding chains from this analysis allows the development of a unique perspective on changes within the local economy.
The concluding chapter brings together the results from the preceding two chapters, analysing them within the context of the wider geographical literature, and argues that the reality of the changing street during the study period is markedly different from the vision of change implicit in much of the literature. While attempts to explore the questions of globalisation and homogeneity are frustrated by the fundamental looseness and vagueness of the terms themselves, the data provides an insight into the changing levels of homogeneity within the study areas and of the growth of chains in the region, and indicates the considerable geographic diversity evident in these processes. Clear evidence of particular shifts in leisure provision emerge, and it becomes possible to identify several different changes in leisure provision happening simultaneously within the study regions. The chapter is concluded by discussion of areas of potential research that follow the methods and issues raised by this research.
The appendices comprise detailed explanations of the data collection process, including the main technical issues that arose, the solutions that were developed in response to these issues, and details of the software that was written to facilitate the multi-stage data-transcription and verification process. Detailed geographical descriptions of the areas into which each region was subdivided are included, as are specific details of several of the classification methodologies that were used.
