Books

Recently I’ve been reading a lot about space. Not the Final Frontier kind but the just-outside-the-door kind. Urban space.

It may have started with Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn, which is just wonderful. Brand shows how buildings aren’t usually designed with a view to their use but instead are often designed to look good in architecture magazines. He argues for space that can be adapted by it’s inhabitants, space that can be changed to reflect the changing needs of it’s users. This is usabilty writ large and with a time-scale of years and decades not hours.

I think I then read William H Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces which is about parks and plazas in New york city and also about people and what they do in public and how they do it and how to watch them. Whyte shows that people do the darndest things like having conversations in the middle of busy throughfares. The thing is that people do this, not because they’re stupid or inconsiderate, but because they like being part of the bustle of the people around them. Like the best research, the things presented in Social Life are so amazingly obvious that you are shocked when you see how often they’re done wrong. Whyte’s main contribution is the wonderfully, head-slappingly, obvious insight that the best way to make a space inviting to people is to give them somewhere to sit. If that place to sit is out of the cold breeze and in the sun with a view of the passing crowd, so much the better. For example, Canberra’s dismal mall in Civic is so cold and lifeless on most days because it’s just a wind tunnel, especially towards the Garema place end.

From there I read Edward T Hall’s The Hidden Dimension. It’s an exploration and explanation of how different cultures percieve space, particularly personal space. Hall is credited with coining the term proxemics. There’s a lot to ponder in The Hidden Dimension, particularly with regard to how people experience and manage cross-cultural interactions.

And I’ve just finished Paco Underhill’s two books on shopping, Why We Buy and The Call of the Mall which are about retail geography. Why We Buy is better.

And now, having read Adam Greenfield’s latest entry, I’m hanging out to find out more on the “New Ludic Urbanism”.