Social Space

Introduction

This section is a preliminary literature review exploring the readings about why we need social spaces and what they actually are, as opposed to the actual literature review which considers how to go about creating one

 

Defining a Social Space

To paraphrase from Carmona et al (2010), there are two types or "realms" of space, movement space and social space e.g. "space for people to engage in various forms of exhange - economic, social and cultural"

 

The easiest way to visualise this is between a street and a road, a road is simply a means of transportation along its length from A to B, a movement space. A street however is a 3d dimensional space between lines of buildings which are both movement and social spaces where people socialise, relax and exhange in commerce.

 

The Demise of Social Space

An issue has arisen with the growth of the automobile during the 20th century,  where automobiles use of space is one of pure circulation has resulted in the supression of a streets social aspects, and streets became roads as a means of allowing faster movement of vehicles between destinations. Traditionally these two forms of space have coexisted with oneather when the alternative means of travel was by horse and cart and the spaces overlapped considerably but new modes of land based travel have accentuated the divide between pedestrians and vehicular travel.

 

Furthermore roads divide and fragment space and entire districts of cities. Releveant to this issues is the creation of two forms of space.

Firstly lost space, e.g. the spaces in between uses that no-one cares about and don't really belong to anyone, Carmona argues that the creation of these spaces lies squarely with the car, privatisation of public space and seperation of uses and users. These spaces include car parks, edges of main roads and bases of high-rise towers and many more (Carmona, 2010)

 

The second is invaded space, this is best example of univeral derision of space, as Gehl argued is where car traffic has gained the upper hand, public space has inevitably changed dramatically with traffic and parking gradually usurping pedestrian space in streets and squares...it doesn’t take long to impoverish city life. Essentially any space left to the pedestrian is still dominated by traffic and the social element of social space is consumed. A further problem caused by this is how it breeds a range of almost exclusivley car orientated environments, where public space simply doesn't exist in traditional form, rather it becomes a series of disjointed car parks connected by roads where all uses have been designed for the car, even pavements dissapear with a pedestrian having to walk through car parks and quiet roads feeling like an intruder. That is not to say though that this environment is all concrete and tarmac though, a place may be physically very green designed to be pretty but these are designed to be viewed from a car window and not designed to be viewed up close by pedestrians.

 

Returning Spaces to People

To quote Jane Jacobs (1961) "Streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of a city, are its most vital organs. Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets. If a city’s streets look interesting, the city looks interesting"

 

This statement was made over 50 years ago and is just as relevant as it is today, cities, as Kevin Lynch reminds are made up of and remembered by humans as a series of paths and edges joined together by nodes. A street may vary considerbly in terms of use, size, character and scale but they all share fundamentally the same principles of how people use the space as argued by Jan Gehl repeatedly, these can be expressed as the following, as seen visually in fig