The book by Alexei Krashennikov reveals the concept of cognitive urban studies - a system of scientific knowledge that integrates ideas from sociology, psychology, geography, cultural studies and other disciplines in order to use them in architecture, urban planning and design.
The desired quality of the urban environment, in the author's opinion, consists of the structural differentiation of the territory into environmental complexes, called micro-, meso-, macrospaces. Social parameters of a place, such as crowdedness, liveliness, connectedness, are considered in relation to distances, permeability of borders, and directions of clustering. The social and spatial parameters of the common areas of the territory predetermine such qualitative characteristics of the urban environment as psychological comfort, social integration, cultural identification.
Cognitive models help develop tools for the analysis and modeling of urban environments. The systematic methodology is illustrated with examples from modern urban planning practice. At the end of the book, a number of mnemonic models are given to facilitate the study of urban studies.
With the kind permission of the KURS publishing house, we publish a fragment from the first chapter of the book.
Environmental complexes as an object of research and design
The social and cultural changes that took place at the end of the twentieth century led to a new understanding of the space-time continuum in which the modern city develops. This continuum is structured using topological models of the urban environment of various scales. Observing the life of public spaces in a modern city has shown that a comfortable urban environment is determined not so much by landscaping, paving and design objects, but by directing the entire "performance" of urban life by organizing a "scene", "pictures of perception" and "areas of events"
The inhabited space of the city includes both places of daily activity and loci of unique events, for example, fairs, festivals, holidays, etc. The urban environment of pedestrian areas serves as the connective tissue of the cultural landscape, which is “consumed” by the townspeople on the basis of a combination of subjective psychological factors (belonging, safety, knowledge and memory) and objective criteria of social comfort of urban spaces: accessibility and connectedness, permeability and liveliness, openness and crowds. Environmental complexes are conditionally identified areas of the territory in which certain scenarios of people's social life are localized, which sets the spatial and social parameters of the environmental context
Modern attempts to form a unified space-time concept of habitable space (Existential Space), new public spaces and new principles of approach to the analysis of built-up areas cannot be imagined without Michel Foucault's ideas.
M. Foucault in 1967 gave a lecture on “specific places” that break the apparent seamlessness, continuity and normality of everyday life. In his short but well-known speech, he drew attention to “other places” in the city, which change ideas about the norms of behavior and the order of the rational organization of anthropogenic space. M. Foucault proposed "heterotopology" as a practice of research, analysis, description, that is, "reading", different spaces.
Later this theory was developed by D. Shane in his book "Recombinant Urbanism". The idea of combinatorics from the basic elements of the urban environment is based on the generalization of a large layer of research and analysis of traditional archetypes of the urban environment, such as place and path. “Place” and “path” should be considered as environmental complexes, i.e. Interpreting and designing the spatial structure should be based on the laws of the spatial behavior of people. As will be shown below, essential factors of the spatial context that determine the nature of social interactions are such spatial parameters as localization, boundaries, distances, openness / closedness of the place of activity, its accessibility and permeability.
In a modern dynamic city, both archetypes - place and path - lose their authenticity in the classical sense and take on new forms. Role-based communication assumes a standard “international” style environment. The larger the city, the more similar the behavior on the street becomes: people move through neutral transport and pedestrian communications and stay there for a short time. People who are not in a hurry seem strange: either they are waiting for someone or they do not know what to do.
It may seem that environmental complexes are exclusively virtual objects and subjective representations, since people are there temporarily, and each person is individual. However, a series of studies conducted in the UK, USA, Russia and other countries suggests that a certain spatial pattern provokes (promotes) quite certain types of human behavior, and vice versa, repetitive behavioral scenarios transform space. This is how stable prototypes of environmental complexes are formed, the meaning of which is reflected in their names, for example, street, courtyard, district, district.
A place is an area of land that is important for social practice. This tradition is widely represented by the texts of social geographers and representatives of the sociology of space. The place is defined primarily in the categories of authenticity, which increases with the growth of the dynamics of urban life, filling with processes, flows and movements that it passes through itself. A place is not only the localization of functional processes and cultural meanings, but also a spatial structure of physical sites, boundaries, lines of movement, points of attraction, membranes and equipment.
The path differs from the place primarily in time and dynamics of perception. It would seem that a path, as well as a place, in a modern city loses its spatial value, since in a crowded city it is broken up by “triggers”, the purpose and context are of secondary importance in comparison with the spatial structure of the environment.
About the author:
Alexey Valentinovich Krasheninnikov –Doctor of Architecture, Professor of the Department of Urban Planning of the Moscow Architectural Institute, member of the Union of Moscow Architects, Advisor to the RAASN, Advisor to the International Federation of Housing and Urban Planning (IFHP). Author of over 70 publications. PhD thesis: "Social and spatial aspect of the formation of the external living environment" (1985). Doctoral dissertation "Urban development foundations of residential development in a market economy" (1998). Head and Director of the Scientific Educational Center "URBANISTIKA" MARCHI (2007).
