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>> Neighbourhood spatial processes:Notes on Public Space, 'Thick' Space, Scale and Centrality

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Stephen Reads.a.read@bk.tudelft.nl

1.0 Urban CentralityTo talk of urban centrality and public space may sound a little old fashioned,the subject of wishful thinking or misty-eyed nostalgia. The city is of coursechanging - seemingly torn apart by the exploding scales and speeds of theprocesses playing themselves out there, and we sometimes think of thedynamism of these spatial processes as being foreign to the city as it oncewas, and often still is in its historical cores - as if the new 'space of flows' isconceptually incompatible with a fundamentally static 'space of places'(Castells, 1996). But the richness of these traditional 'places' is just as mucha product of life patterns in motion as is the fragmentation of the experientialand social fabric of the city on it's periphery. The city and change are nostrangers to each other and cities have burst beyond the constraints of theiredges before. The space of the city has always existed in a tension betweeninside and outside, between the local and larger scales, and between inhab-itant and the traveller, trader or stranger. It is possible to overstate present-day change and to imagine that all that we know about cities from their his-tories is becoming irrelevant - and also to lose sight of the importance of cen-trality and a rich diversity of scales in any story about the city. Those whoclaim the city is becoming uniformly generic without centrality and peripher-ality, and without public space, haven't been shopping in my neighbourhood.Of course there is a new city emerging and of course it is recasting the ques-tion about the nature of the city - but it is forcing us to reappraise our con-cepts of what both the old city of centres and peripheries and our new dis-persed 'generic' city are. The two continue to coexist alongside one another- as indeed they did before the terms generic or edge city were ever coined.And the reappraisal can do as much to help us to understand what the natureof centrality is as it can help us to understand what the diffusing and invad-ing generic city is.

SPACELABresearch laboratoryfor the contemporary city

Faculty of ArchitectureDelft University of TechnologyBerlageweg 12628 CR Delftspacelab@bk.tudelft.nlwww.spacelab.tudelft.nl

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I'm going to approach the problem of public space in a way that may soundstrange at first - by talking about urban space as a mechanism. I will try toavoid some of the more difficult issues of meaning by considering the city asa functional thing - as something that works at a simple level of everydayactivity and experience. The city is of course complex but one of the remark-able things about it is that although it seems to be such a difficult thing todescribe and analyse in any way which explains its workings, we seem to useit very easily indeed. Perhaps there is something about the way we deal withthe city at a very everyday, very intuitive level which may be a key to itsunderstanding.

Of course meaning comes back into this as well. A lot of questions about thecity and our relation to it - and our relation to neighbours and strangers with-in more or less public space - are about the way the city acts at the same timeas a physical environment and as a model in everyday life of less tangiblethings like society, community, and so on. It is more than a metaphor, it is ademonstration in the real world of the workings of social and cultural systems.And the important thing is that it happens right there before our eyes - in oursensible experiential world - and it happens in such a way that we areimmersed in it. So it is at the same time the real thing and a representationof itself which we latch onto and use as a model or metaphor for under-standing the workings of things like society and community. So the city is atone and the same time both a material environment (made up of both peopleand things) that we engage in a very direct way - and a material groundingfor a mental construct supporting all sorts of ideas that we take for grantedas constituting our lives, often without crediting the city for doing any of thesethings. It's like language in a way, an only half-seen background to our every-day lives which nonetheless supports constructs of everyday meaning andknowledge.

But if the city is a machine, what sort of machine is it? What is clear is that itis not the sort of machine that has a very clear programmatic aim, or neces-sarily any built in programmatic aim at all. Nor is it a machine for supportingsomething like community or neighbourhood or economy or anything likethat, though it may eventually do all these things as a lucky consequence ofwhat it was doing in the first place. I suggest that the city is, or rather hasbeen in its best moments, a machine for supporting intelligibility and for sup-porting interface - interface between people, and particularly interfacebetween people operating and doing things at different scales. We are talk-ing here about networks of course and about the ways networks at differentscales overlap each other and then interface in the urban field. I believe thatwe can talk here about both virtual networks and those networks of social andeconomic contact and interaction built into the spatial infrastructures ofstreets squares and public and private transport networks, but here I will beconsidering these effects as they play out within and affect the quality of pub-lic space.

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But the city, because it is not programmatically specific, is also a machine forchange. The city, as a field or background for human activity, will absorb thedominant activities of the time - form 'permanences' (Harvey, 1996) orencrustations of relatively ephemeral programmatic and institutional stuffaround the urban spatial network structure, which can change as the citychanges from for example an industrial base to a services base to an enter-tainment and tourist base. The city organises and structures human activity,but it does this according to a principle of scale not a principle of programme,and different scales are held in relation to each other in a way which supportsintelligibility and coherence.

2.0 Space, public space, and relations between local and higher scalesIf what I have just said is true, urban space is not just the simple physicalstuff, or the void between the physical stuff, that we draw on maps. Urbanspace is at the same time both physical and mental. Lefebvre has taught usthat if we want to understand anything about urban space we have to look atboth these aspects together and never reduce the urban to simply the phys-ical or simply the mental (Lefebvre, 1991). Space, or rather ideas aboutspace, are also ways that we understand and construct our world. Recentlythere has been a lot of talk about space as flux. This is a space with multipleoverlapping dynamics, one which emphasises multivalent connection. It isabout extension continuity and unity, about a field whose centralities andvoids are defined by and emergent out of the dynamics that play out withinthe field.

There is another kind of space with which many of us (especially designers)are even more familiar, which involves codes for the production of our phys-ical environment, some of which are so familiar they have become almostinvisible. This space is much more closely tied to issues of territory andbounding. It is about the parts which make up wholes, about areas which areassumed to have a certain autonomy and about the relations between them.Many of our familiar ideas about neighbourhood, about urban functionalzones and so on are based in a basic framework of bounded areas and therelations between them.

This conception of space leads to a fundamentally different view of neigh-bourhood - or more generally 'the local' - and its relations with the rest of thecity than does that of the idea of different scales of network interfacing eachother in a structured manner. On the one hand we have a patchwork of localzones with relations between themselves, and on the other we have relationsbetween local networks and higher scales - these higher scales acting as net-work systems in their own right and mediating relations between local zones.

In fact if we look at neighbourhoods in a lot of more traditional cities it is clearthat neighbourhood is not this clearly bounded phenomenon. Neighbourhoodseems difficult to delimit spatially and seems to be something which emerges

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out of urban processes, rather than being the result of bounding intended tocontrol urban processes. The second spatial framework mentioned abovehas been used for the more planned production of urban space but the first(that of flux) has always produced urban space, especially where the moreconscious and deliberate process of the second has not dominated. Today,the first spatial process is again becoming more insistent and taking overfrom the second as the flows in our urban landscape speed up and escapethe control of the spatial techniques and practices of planning and design.The space of flux has always produced urban space in more organic settle-ments, where preconceived ideas of neighbourhood or of urban programmedo not form a prestructuring framework. Rather the prestructuring frameworkin organic settlements is more directly influenced by everyday life processesand their patterns, especially those related to mobility.

The notion of a public space is one of those seemingly self-evident ideaswhich benefits from a more rigorous inspection. We tend to define publicspace in opposition to the notion of private - rendering it crudely homoge-neous and failing to account for its complexity and unevenness as a field forsocial activity and meaning. In fact public space has always been highlyuneven in the way it supports urban activity and urban society and in itsaccessibility and meaning, and it is not at all clear within the public-privatepolarity what the exact dimensions of public space are as they affect issuesof social power and empowerment. The concepts public and private are notabsolute, they acquire meaning in context and in relation to one another.Public and private serve to organise contrasts within different paradigmswhile across paradigm boundaries meanings can differ profoundly - the pub-lic of the public sector is something different to that of the public realm and isdifferent again to that of the public interest. Clearly then, the public-privatepolarity presents epistemiological and terminological problems, and is lessstraight-forward than it is sometimes taken to be. In relation to the public ofsocial groupings in a larger society, what in fact seems to happen is that seg-ments of society pursue their own limited interests in opposition, or at least indifferentiation, to a wider public - clearly segmenting the amorphous idea ofthe public or the public realm by scale (Borret, 2001). This scale segmenta-tion can be taken further and related not just to more formal social organisa-tional structures, but also to multiple, more mobile, less clearly articulated,but nonetheless real issues of everyday identification in urban space. Thepublic may then be defined not in opposition to the private but rather in termsof the relations between multiple publics.

3.0 Urban fabrics and their typologiesTo talk about produced social environments as typologies or shapes of lay-out is ineffective without talking at the same time about typologies or shapesof use. And as soon as one starts talking about use, we can no longer talkabout that layout without considering the way that everyday patterns of useand activity weave an area into the surrounding fabric and beyond. In a sense

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the interwoven patterns of peoples everyday activities becomes the fabric ofthe city of our social and cultural experience. The expanding everydayprocesses of the new city and new patterns of use are producing new envi-ronments on the periphery. But they are also often emphasising the dynam-ic, connective, integrative aspect of use and space in centres and giving riseto programmatically different ways of using the city in the centre thatnonetheless (in many or most cases) do not fall outside of the capacities ofcentral urban space for programmatic adaptation and change.

The city sometimes looks to be unravelling - processes of mobility and habi-tation are disengaging from each other as the city expands beyond the cen-tre. The historical centre is characterised by proximity and contiguity - mobil-ity connects all places with all other places within a context of high densitiesof people and things. Local and larger scales confront one another and con-tiguous flows of people, goods, money and information energise and enricheach other. On the periphery with mobility patterns historically directedtowards the centre, mobility tends to concentrate in engineered infrastruc-tures and to disengage from the functionally and experientially diluted fabricthrough which it is woven. The dense, integrated experience of the city is lostas habitation is consigned to capsular interstices between high speed arter-ies where the direct friction between local and larger scales is evaded.Relationships of scales and patterns of activity in the periphery become verydifferent to those in the inner cities. The question is; how is the environmenton the periphery we are sketching out here public, and how does its public-ness relate to that of our traditional city centre model?

The public space that one enters as one steps out one's front door in aneighbourhood like that of the Pijp in Amsterdam (see Figure 7b) is not anempty neutral form. The local intrinsic qualities - what is immediate and seen- mask another space whose qualities are extrinsic and which comprises apattern of known and understood relations, relations with friends, neighbours,work, shops, facilities, meeting points, entertainment. There is no doubt thatmany of these relations are undergoing transformation but many remaingrounded in the public space of neighbourhoods such as this. What I wouldlike to do is examine how these relations are grounded in old and new typesof neighbourhoods, and what the consequences might be for public space.

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3.1 A neighbourhood within the inner city

Figure 1. A local relational space.

Social spaces are constructed in use, and the ways experience and identityare grounded in urban space are multiple and highly specific. Meaning is con-structed in the way places are inhabited and experienced in relation to eachother, and then insofar as these spatial relations and meanings are shared,they become one of the ways that social groups define and identify them-selves. A local social space therefore may consist of the shared experienceand the shared significance of locations and relations within a field of con-nective possibilities, and crude representations of the set of relations can beconstructed using node and edge diagrams. Local spaces may, in a mixedneighbourhood, consist of the dwelling places of the members of an ethnicgroup along with the places - shops and cultural facilities - they use and withwhich they identify. It may also simply be the locations of the houses of agroup of friends along with the cafe they frequent and the supermarket wherethey bump into each other.

Figure 2.An inner-city neighbourhood. Local relational space superimposed over the physical layout.

Mapping trajectories through the physical layout generates the social space.

The diagram is of course a gross simplification, and represents relationsbetween nodes as abstracted topological connections. But consider howthese connections are going to be translated into movement through theactual geometry of the layout, and one gets a sense of the way that membersof the same group could meet on the street in the course of their everydayactivities. Mapping trajectories through the physical layout therefore gener-ates the social space one finds on the street.

Figure 3. Overlapping local relational spaces superimposed over the physical layout.

Many of these local social spaces will of course coexist and overlap in thesame urban area. Superimposing just two of them already begins to give asense of the huge density of connections and relations that are starting to begenerated. What is also interesting is the way, if you map trajectories of peo-ple through the streets of the layout you can show how people using differ-ent local social spaces will come into daily contact with each other - buildinga dense web of social interface and co-presence - a thick urban social space.

The local social space in a traditional urban neighbourhood is also subject tocertain characteristic urban scale differentiations and hierarchies, as in thedifference between streets which are quiet and residential and those whereshopping and facilities concentrate - typically on the high-street, where localpeople and those from outside the neighbourhood are co-present. Within thenormal compass therefore of a person's daily neighbourhood activities andwithin the local walkable neighbourhood, there are not one but two scales ofurban activity. Contact and co-presence is made on a daily basis not only withimmediate neighbours but also with people from outside the neighbourhoodwho use the shops and other facilities on the high streets. Although the highstreets serve as traffic arteries they are in no way specialised as such. I willillustrate this further in my discussion of the example.It is interesting to note that the neighbourhood 'territory' is not simplisticallybounded, but is defined in a relational way and that it is this that allows andsupports the social and cultural overlap and diversity that we find in traditionalurban space.7

3.2 A neighbourhood on the periphery

Figure 4. A neighbourhood on the periphery. Local relational space superimposed over the physical

layout.

In contrast, neighbourhood and community on the periphery is in generalfounded on territory that is about the bounding or encapsulation of land - gen-erally in the interstices between specialised movement routes. These neigh-bourhoods tend also to be more socially and culturally homogeneous whilesocial and commercial facilities tend to become segregated from the housingand concentrated in more 'generic' capsules of malls and 'centres' of varioustypes, accessed through the specialised mobility network. Relations whichmay have been local in the centre, embedded in the neighbourhood and inthe local social space, have become distantiated and accessible only throughthe specialised mobility network.

3.3 The territorial gradient; capturing the spatial/social typology

Figure 5. An inner-city neighbourhood. Territorial gradient.8

Figure 6. A neighbourhood on the periphery. Territorial gradient.

Julia Robinson has coined the term territorial gradient for these diagrams(Robinson, 2001). They represent a schematic section through the gradientof privacy that a person experiences in his or her everyday life - from thelargest public scale to the most intimate and private - marked off in steps frombottom to top. There is a sequence from the very private, the bedroom,through gradations of involvement with others within the dwelling, thenthrough local social space - through different scales of public space - andeventually to those 'generic' public spaces, the 'centres', malls and other facil-ities attached to no particular public. Historically, when the city encompassedthe daily lives of almost all people, this largest scale was associated with thepublic centre of the city. As the lives of people escape the bounds of the oldcity of course the new accessibility and centrality (at this regional scale) ofthe periphery siphons many of the facilities associated with this scale off intothe periphery.

The local social space in the area on the periphery is much reduced com-pared with that in the urban centre. This is not to suggest that no distantiat-ed relationships exist in social patterns in the inner city, simply that in theprocess represented by the change from urban life to suburban, relationswhich were local have tended to become distantiated. The relative socialhomogeneity of new residential areas and the use of private transport in localareas means that relations between different local social spaces are effec-tively eliminated. These factors have a serious consequence for the 'shape'of public space as it is defined by these relations. Consider the outline I havetraced around the public space that is effectively experienced by the peoplewhose territorial gradients are drawn here. The thick shape of the publicspace for the inner-city neighbourhood is a consequence of the richness ofconnection between local relational and social spaces. The thinness of theexperience of public space in the neighbourhood on the periphery is a directconsequence of the lack of this richness of connectedness and co-presence.9

Another serious transformation in the 'shape' of this set of relations is the loss ofthe scale represented in the centre by the high street. The simple pattern ofmobility network and attached 'capsules' means that the largest generic and thesmallest local scales predominate and the middle scales of direct connection toadjacent areas is lost, along with the economic and cultural advantages this kindof connection can be seen to generate in inner city areas like the Pijp inAmsterdam.

Central public space is much richer in relationships, as local social spaces comein contact with each other, and in the relationship of the local with a 'middle' scalein the high street. This illustrates further how peripheral spatial layouts suffer aloss in the experience of 'the public'. If the meaning and quality of public spaceare dependent on this spatial connective richness and breadth, the territorial gra-dient demonstrates how 'public space' in the periphery, even that in well-designed'new urbanist' neighbourhoods with all the obvious intrinsic qualities designed in- the house styles, the street furniture, even the 'corner shop' - may be experi-enced quite differently. It is the extrinsic qualities of space - demonstrated by theterritorial gradient - that make the difference, and here it is difficult to find com-mon ground between the 'space of many publics' of the traditional centre and this'space of a rather depleted public', no matter how visually attractive, on theperiphery.

4.0 The spatial mechanics of the local and middle scalesI have done a lot of work establishing that there is a two part hierarchy - corre-sponding to the high-street, residential street distinction - in normal central urbanspace which has a fundamentally spatial basis. I have argued that the distributionof activities is not simply based in an historical narrative of decisions and eventsbut rather that it is fundamentally based in a spatial patterning which influencesthe ways people move. Flows of people through the traditional urban spatial gridtend to concentrate in a higher level network called the supergrid, and I haveargued elsewhere that this two part hierarchy of supergrid and less-used, usual-ly residential, streets is fundamental to our everyday experience of the historicalcity. I have argued further that it underpins the mechanisms of interface and intel-ligibility that I am talking about here (Read, forthcoming 2002).

We can understand from our experience of traditional urban space the charac-teristic distinction in any local area between relatively busy streets and relativelymuch quieter ones. I am arguing that this is a principle feature of the spatialmechanism - one that designers often understand intuitively. When we look atplans of cities we can usually pick out with some degree of accuracy which aregoing to be the busy streets just by their geometrical attributes. My work with spa-tial models has established this systematically and I have been using these mod-els to investigate the relationship between the high-street and the area around it.In particular how the relationship between high-street and area radically influ-ences the character of both high street and the lesser-used streets comprisingthe area (Read, 2001).10

It is in fact this interaction between the high-street and the area - betweentherefore the scale of the local neighbourhood and the urban scales justabove that of the neighbourhood - which seems to determine a lot of the char-acter and commercial and social functioning of urban spaces.

4.1 The Pijp neighbourhood in Amsterdam

I will use the example of the Pijp neighbourhood in Amsterdam in order to dis-cuss the spatial/social mechanics of the local and middle scales.

Figure 7a shows a high-street space in the Pijp and Figure 7b a quiet resi-dential street. What is significant is the way the readability of the urban envi-ronment - its knowability and usability therefore - are connected to the sim-ple code that is reflected by this bipartite ordering. The city at the level of itsparticulars is manifestly rich and complex, but the complexity of the detailwith which we are confronted in our daily interaction with the city is refer-enced to this intuitively known and understood spatial order, rendering com-plexity knowable and the well-functioning urban context thick with meaningand information. Multiple particulars relating to street-scene and the life-pat-terns of people become meaningful and intelligible with respect to each otherthrough their relation to this order. Particular locations become related to thewider city while they at the same time maintain their local particularity anddistinctiveness.

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Figure 7a. Ferdinand Bolstraat, the Pijp

Figure 7b. Jacob van Campenstraat, the Pijp

Figure 8. Map of the Pijp neighbourhood in Amsterdam.

The Pijp is crossed by four strong high-street axes, two running roughlynorth-south, two running east-west, making it an area which is powerfullyconnected to the rest of the city. The radial north-south axes are theFerdinand Bolstraat and the van Woustraat, and the circumferential east-west axes are the Stadhouderskade and the Centuurbaan. I will concentrateon these streets and the area around them.

I want to first look at how the interface between the scales of the area andthe supergrid is constructed in the patterning of streets. There is nothing spa-tially forced or complicated about the spatial layout, minor streets simplymeet supergrid streets at right angles, more often than not crossing them sothat a four-way crossing is established. If we look at the way these spacesare used, the first thing that can be said is that the characters and the typesof function supported on the circumferential, east-west supergrid streets aredifferent to those supported on the radial supergrid streets.

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The extremely good accessibility from the rest of the city of this circumferen-tial axis, the Stadhouderskade and the Ceintuurbaan, is reflected functional-ly in the concentration of computer, carpet, curtain, furniture and householdgoods stores which clearly serve a much wider area than just the local neigh-bourhood.

The characters of the Ferdinand Bolstraat and the van Woustraat, the north-south axis, are very noticeably different. Although they both also carry highvolumes of motor traffic, the volume of pedestrian movement on these tworoutes is very much higher and the types of shops supported here reflect amuch closer link with the immediate neighbourhood. Many smaller stores aresupplemented by the high-street clothing, electrical goods and generalhousehold goods chains.

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Figure 9a. The Stadhouderskade - running east-west.

Figure 9b. The Centuurbaan - running east-west.

Figure 10a. The Ferdinand Bolstraat - running north-south.

Figure 10b. The van Woustraat - running north-south.

Figure 11a. The Pijp: point depth diagram showing direct links from the Stadhouderskade and Centuurbaan

with the interior of the area (in green).

Figure 11b. The Pijp: point depth diagram showing direct links from the Ferdinand Bolstraat and van

Woustraat with the interior of the area (in green).

It is clear if we look at these diagrams that the openness of the area grid andthe transparency of the area from the north-south axes is quite significantlyhigher than it is from the the east-west axes. The block geometries are suchthat there are more than twice the density of inner-area streets that connectwith the Ferdinand Bolstraat and the van Woustraat as connect with theCeintuurbaan and the Stadhouderskade. The visual link down these inner-area streets is strong and direct - the green spikes represent direct sightlinesand permeabilities from within the area. The area therefore has a strong east-west bias, orientating itself on the Ferdinand Bolstraat and the van Woustraatand making them the dominant local-area shopping streets.

From within the area the Ferdinand Bolstraat and van Woustraat are felt asa constant presence. Much of this is related to the awareness of movementand to the awareness of a higher intensity of activity along these routes. Thismovement and higher activity are picked up visually, and serve to orientateand to signal the spatial structure, which they do without ever becoming intru-sive.

But while it is clear that the Ferdinand Bolstraat and the van Woustraat relatestrongly to the local area, the link with the wider city is also strong, and thepeople on these streets and the clientele in the shops are by no meansrestricted to people from the local neighbourhood. Rather this is also a pop-ular medium-priced shopping area for people from other parts of Amsterdamand even for visitors from out of town.

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While spatial hierarchies are reflected functionally through a concentration ofshopping and activity in the circuit defined by the crossing of the high-streetaxes, this is by no means the end of the story. The openness of the areaengendered by the simple open grid ensures that though the functional hier-archies are clear they are by no means rigid. Shopping penetrates the interi-or of the area, where rentals are cheaper and where non-prime positions aretaken by second-hand shops, bicycle and other repair shops, specialist foodshops, restaurants, cafes etc.

The interior of the area seems to serve to some extent as overflow space tothe major supergrid spaces. It is apparent that the openness of the gridserves to soften and blur the structure, and that the blurring that this open-ness engenders allows a freer use of space both for movement, and com-mercially - where shops which serve the local area and which cannot affordthe high-street rentals find places which are still exposed, though at a lowerintensity, within these blurred movement patterns. The whole 'interior' of thePijp between these four major supergrid streets therefore has its activity lev-els raised. The most remarkable example of this slippage of commercial func-tions into the interior of the area is the Albert Cuyp Market, the largest dailystreet market in Amsterdam, which occupies a whole inner-area street strungbetween the Ferdinand Bolstraat and the van Woustraat - in a sense becom-ing an extension of the shopping frontage of these shopping streets.

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Figure 12a. Gerald Douplein

Figure 12b. Albert Cuyp Market

Figure 13a. Frans Halsstraat.

A contrary effect to this infusion of movement and activity into the interior ofthe large 'block' bounded by the major high-street spaces, can be observedon the other sides of the Ferdinand Bolstraat and the van Woustraat. Herethe grids are also extremely open but the effects of the pull of strong high-street spaces does not work across the area itself, given that the spaces onthe other sides of these areas exert a much weaker attraction than do the fourstreets already mentioned.

These areas then, while being highly open and transparent, as well as high-ly intelligible and strongly located because of their visual openness - are by-passed by the major movement patterns. Here high clarity and intelligibilitycombines with a quiet ambience, the whole adding up to a quality in the totalenvironment whose parameters are rather difficult at first sight to pin down.These areas are popular with young professionals and other urbanites inspite of their high densities and very small houses.

5.0 Summing up: Places of flowsMultiple overlapping processes and their respective scales are coordinatedwithin public space by the fact that they are grounded in material flows with-in a real urban spatial connective context. The grounding of these processesdraws the spatial factor into the equation with its specific configurations ofspatial connection, permeability and resistance. The Pijp shows how thestructure produced within this spatial context may order the details of urbancircumstance as well as patterns of social interface in the surface of the city,differentiating volumes and scales of movement and activity, and formallyarticulating the city as a intelligible field for everyday use.

What I can begin to propose, is that certain spatial layouts, characterised byopenness and transparency at the local scale, combined with strong con-nection to their surroundings at the scale immediately above the local, offerthe necessary spatial-structural qualities to support the sort of structureddiversity, overlap and busy-ness characteristic of well-functioning centralurban locations. They enable a multiplicity of use which is at the same timespatially and functionally articulated and intelligible. These environmentsabsorb and sustain a life of the city, structured around but not determined bythe scales of the local and the wider city. The particular social and culturalvitality of these environments is underpinned by a rich overlap of social andcultural meanings constructed within relational spaces - where individual andgroup territories are specific and clear without being exclusive, and relationsbetween the local and the middle urban scales is strong and direct.

These environments also underpin a potential for change. It is the strength ofplaces like the Pijp that they are capable of changing in tune with changingtimes - in fact it is often on the streets of places like this that we first noticethat social or cultural change is taking place. Here periodic decline hasalways been followed by new awakenings, with new street cultures and16

economies growing up to replace older ones as wider social and economicorders are transformed. The 'permanences' - comprising particular materialencrustations of function and culture - break down as social and economicconditions change, but the underlying structure, founded in space and inmobility remains, around which new encrustations, emerging from new socialand economic conditions, may form.

Urban centrality is constructed on movement flows and activity patterns with-in the urban spatial matrix. It is constructed on a dynamic and is itself dynam-ic. A conception of urban centrality and place founded in these ideas mayoffer a framework both for investigating the shifting fortunes of urban centresand locations as they respond to shifts in the scales and circuits of theseflows in the city the region and beyond, and for designing vital urban placescapable of supporting a rich mix of urban life and culture.

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Bibliography

Borret, K. (2001). 'On Domains: the Public, The Private and the Collective',OASE 54, Winter 2001, 50-61.

Castells, M. (1996), The Rise of the Network Society, Blackwell, Oxford.

Harvey, D. (1996), Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Blackwell, Oxford.

Lefebvre, H. (1991), The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford.

Read, S. (2001), ''Thick' Urban Space: Shape, Scale and the Articulation of 'the Urban' in an Inner-city Neighbourhood of Amsterdam.' As yet unpub-lished paper presented at the Third International Symposium on spaceSyntax, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta.

Read, S. forthcoming in Space Syntax I, 2002, 'The Patchwork Landscape and the 'Engendineered' Web; Space and Scale in the Dutch City',Available as working paper.

Robinson, JW. (2001), 'Institutional Space, Domestic Space and Power: Revisiting Territoriality with Space Syntax.' As yet unpublished paperpresented at the Third International Symposium on space Syntax,Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta.

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