Quality of Urban Life: Social, Psychological, and Physical Conditions [Reprint 2013 ed.] 9783110884968, 9783110105773

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The Quality of Urban Life

The Quality of Urban Life Social, Psychological, and Physical Conditions Edited by Dieter Frick in cooperation with Hans-Wolfgang Hoefert, Heiner Lege wie, Rainer Mackensen, and Rainer Κ. Silbereisen

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Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York 1986

Dr. -Ing. Dieter Frick Professor of Urban and Regional Planning Institut für Stadt-und Regionalplanung Technische Universität Berlin

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data

Quality of urban life. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. City and town life. 2. Quality of life. I. Frick, Dieter, 1933II. Hoefert, Hans-Wolfgang. HT119.Q35 1986 307.7'6 86-16838 ISBN 0-89925-095-5 (U.S.)

CIP-Kurztitelaufnahme

der Deutschen

Bibliothek

Quality of urban life: social, psychology and phys. conditions/ed. by Dieter Frick in cooperation with Hans-Wolfgang Hoefert . . . - Berlin : New York : de Gruyter, 1986. ISBN 3-11-010577-2 NE: Frick, Dieter [Hrsg.]

Copyright © 1986 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin 30. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form - by photoprint, microfilm or any other means nor transmitted nor translated into a machine language without written permission from the publisher. - Typesetting: Wyvern Typesetting Limited, Bristol, England. - Printing: Gerike GmbH, Berlin. - Binding: Dieter Mikolai, Berlin. - Cover design: Lothar Hildebrand, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Preface

It was at a series of discussions held by sociologists, psychologists, and town and country planners on their current research which took place at the Department of Social and Planning Sciences at the Technische Universität Berlin in 1984, that my fellow editors and I discovered our common interest in the "quality of urban life". We were able to pursue this interest further at an international conference entitled 'Metropolitan Shape and the Quality of Life' sponsored by the Technische Universität Berlin and the Senator für Bau- und Wohnungswesen Berlin (Senator for Housing in West Berlin). It was due to our many encounters with the colleagues from both home and abroad who came to Berlin, that the idea subsequently emerged of creating a book based on a selection of the contributions to the conference. It was to consist of analysis, elucidation, and constructive suggestions for the improvement of the quality of urban life. This book now lies before you. We hope that it may serve as proof that the idea of close cooperation between the social and engineering sciences embodied in the foundation of the Department of Social and Planning Sciences has been, and is, a productive and a fruitful one. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the authors, both in my own name and that of my fellow editors, for their open-mindedness and patience in bearing with us. Also, Frau Dr. Petra Schuhler who was responsible for the initial organization necessary for the publication of this book. Frau Maureen Metzger has been responsible for checking the language and editing, Jörg Sonntag for putting together the Author Index. They all three, have made my job easier. The publishers have been consistently agreeable and cooperative. Berlin (West), April 1986

Dieter Frick

Contents

Part A: Overview: Quality of Urban Life Introduction Dieter Frick

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1. The New Urban Crisis Manuel Castells

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2. Psychological Aspects of the Quality of Urban Life Harold M. Proshansky and Abbe K. Fabian 1 Introduction 2 The Meaning of the Quality of Urban Life 3 Issues in Describing the Physical Environment 4 Issues in the Definition of the Person

19 19 20 22 24

3. On Cities, Design, and People Gabriele Scintemi 1 The Future of Cities and the Role of Design 2 Death and Life of the Modern Movement 3 "Megastructura Labilis" 4 Post-Modern and Beyond 5 What Next?

31 31 31 36 40 44

Part B: Social Networks Introduction Rainer Mackensen 4. Social Networks and the Quality of Life Bernhard Badura 1 Time to Care 2 Social Support 5. Social Networks in Urban Neighbourhoods Wolfgang Sodeur 1 The Impact of Urban Environment on Social Networks . . . . 2 Urban Environments and Social Networks: How to Study Network Properties in Large Populations? 3 Conclusions

49 55 55 56 61 61 64 71

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Contents 6. Network Procedures J. Clyde Mitchell 1 Growth of Network Studies 2 Macro and Micro Approaches 3 The Contextualization of Social Networks 4 The Features of the Network 5 Basis of the Determinancy of Social Action 6 Data Collection 7 The Manchester Homeless Families Study 8 The Analysis of the Data 9 Conclusions

Part C: Ethnic Minorities Introduction Ute Schönpflug and Rainer Κ. Silbereisen

73 73 73 74 74 75 76 76 78 90

93

7. Acculturation and Stress Among Immigrants and Later Generation Individuals Amado M. Padilla 1 Introduction 2 A Model of Acculturation 3 Psychological Stress: A Model and Some Findings 4 Some Observations from the Data 5 Conclusions

101 101 102 106 117 118

8. The Pattern of Acculturation amongst Asian and Caribbean Descended Youth in Britain John Rex 1 The Limitations of Acculturation Theory 2 The Asian Immigrants to Great Britain 3 The West Indian Immigrants to Great Britain 4 Conclusions

121 121 122 131 133

9. Acculturation in Urban Areas: Migrant Workers and the Settlement of Turks in West Berlin Czarina Wilpert 1 Introduction 2 Models of Acculturation and Assimilation 3 Towards a More Differentiated View 4 The Urban Concentration of Turkish Settlement Patterns . . . . 5 The Cultural Diversity of the Turkish Enclave in West Berlin . . . 6 Research Findings 7 Occupational Orientations of the Turkish Youth in West Berlin/ Acculturation?

135 135 136 139 140 141 142 143

Contents 8 9

Work Values Future Orientations Towards Working and Living

Part D: Man - Environment Relations Introduction Dieter Frick and Hans-Wolfgang Hoefert

ix 144 145

151

10. The Use and Design of Open Spaces in Urban Neighbourhoods AmosRapoport 1 Introduction 2 The Conceptual Framework 3 Activities and Activity Systems 4 Settings and Systems of Settings 5 Supportive Environments 6 The Neighbourhood as Setting System 7 An Example: Pedestrian Activities 8 Design and Research

159 159 159 160 162 165 167 169 172

11. Aesthetic, Communication and Use: Perspectives for Urban Open Spaces Thomas Sieverts

177

12. An Ecological Approach to Urban Environment Perception Mirilia Bonnes 1 Introduction 2 Methodological Aspects 3 Type one Studies: Perceptions of the Whole Urban Environment . 4 Type two Studies: Perception of the Quality of the Residential Environment in the Sample Area 5 Type three Studies: Inhabitants' and Temporary Visitors' Cognitive Representation of the City 6 Conclusions 13. Psychological Identity of and Identification With Urban Neighbourhoods Gerhard Schneider 1 Introduction 2 Design of the Research Project 3 Identity of and Identification with One's Neighbourhood as Reflected in Subjective Presentations 4 Identity Markers in the Physical Environment 5 Identification with the Neighbourhood qua Social Environment . 6 Conclusions

189 189 191 192 196 197 201

203 203 205 208 213 214 216

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Contents

Part E: Mental Health Introduction Heiner Legewie and Peter M. Wiedemann 14. New York City's Open Space System. The Process of Evolution Tom Fox 15. The Reform of Health and Psychiatric Services in Relation to the Quality of Urban Life. Experiences in the Region of Piedmont and in the City of Turin Agostino Pirella 1 Introduction 2 Decentralization of Mental Health Services (MHS) in Piedmont and in the City of Turin 3 Transformations and Crises 4 Dismantling the Psychiatric Hospitals in Turin 16. From the Social Movement Towards the Socio-Cultural Movement. The Example of Amsterdam Roland Günter List of Authors Author Index

219 229

241 241 243 244 245

249 257 259

Part A: Overview: Quality of Urban Life Introduction 1 Dieter Frick

1. This book appears at a time when, in the economically developed countries at least, awareness of the threat to the quality of life in general and urban life in particular has increased dramatically. This is indicated not only by public statements made by persons in politics, government and public life, but also by the beginnings already made in scientific research. Yet, whereas up to now the debate on ecological, that is natural, conditions and resources has enjoyed great publicity, the social and physical dimension has been kept somewhat in the background. This could be for several reasons. To begin with, proof and information about the reduction in the quality and the poisoning of the air, water, soil, and the flora and fauna, particularly in the large metropolitan areas, have assumed virtually catastrophic proportions. Secondly, the extent and spread of the damage is making it increasingly difficult for even the privileged to escape the inevitable consequences for their own personal quality of life. Thirdly, in most of the developed western democracies a real concern for the natural environment has become a question of political survival for governments and parties. The social and physical dimension of the quality of urban life has probably received so much less attention due to the fact that the déficiences, which essentially are as old as the industrial age itself, appear to be limited in time and space. People think that they can just avoid the unattractive parts of town with their social problems or, that they will be redeveloped some day. However, in the long run the quality of life in a city is not divisible. Not only do the negative changes which affect the whole city, for instance, the ecological ones, call for research and counter measures, but equally so the social problems and physical insufficiences which exist in different ways in the individual neighbourhoods. It is for this reason that the contributors to this book have concentrated their efforts on the social, psychological, and physical conditions of the quality of urban life. 2. The stabilization, improvement and, if need be, the rehabilitation of the quality of 1 I would like to thank my fellow editors for their criticism and suggestions regarding this introduction.

The Quality of Urban Life © 1986 Walter de Gruyter & Co. · Berlin · New York

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urban life in a heavily populated region, that is in a large metropolitan area, should be the principal objective of urban design and planning. Each design, each plan, each social or physical undertaking should be judged according to whether or not it contributes to the attainment of this aim. This presupposes, however, that the relation between each overall goal and each individual planning decision can be defined as precisely as possible. Part of the failure of urban design and urban planning to stabilize and further improve the quality of urban life in the past four decades has been due to lack of knowledge. It has also partially been the fault of professional urban planners, as well as the local and regional decision makers (Scimemi in this volume: 46; Rapoport in this volume: 172) who not infrequently have ignored the far-sighted concepts on their desks and have been lacking in the necessary persistence in the step by step realization of planning decisions and measures already agreed upon. However, it is only through perfecting our knowledge and deepening our understanding that better concepts can be worked out and persuasive tactics brought to bear, and thus the chance of wrong decision making reduced. Research into the manifold components of the quality of urban life is, therefore, a vital precondition for dealing in future with the invaluable heritage of the social and physical substance of our cities in a more intelligent and circumspect manner. For this reason, the contributions in this book are also directed at the problem of working out and providing the basis for municipal political action which will benefit the quality of urban life, and not merely towards finding out more about the components and correlations between the different aspects of the quality of urban life. 3. The quality of urban life has an objective and a subjective aspect. Objectively it can be measured by the level of physical and mental health enjoyed by the inhabitants of an area. The absence of it, or the fact that it is threatened, can be measured by the extent of the psychosomatic disturbances and the social disintegration connected with long-term residence in a city or a neighbourhood (Legewie and Wiedemann in this volume: 219). Subjectively the quality of urban life, its presence or its absence, is measured by the sum of the perceptions and experiences of those who live in, work in and visit a city or a neighbourhood and the judgments resulting from these perceptions and experiences. The objective and the subjective perspectives can, but not necessarily, accord with one another. The subjective opinions of the inhabitants may also be systematically wrong. Apart from this, the quality of urban life in its social, physical, and ecological dimension is experienced in different environments and is displayed on varying social and spacial levels. That which the inhabitants subjectively perceive and experience as the presence or absence of the quality of life and which, on the other hand, can be objectively described as such, is composed of different environments. Usually these are experienced separately in space and time, such as, for instance, the home environment, the work environment, and the recreation environment. These various

Overview:

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environments are expressed physically in the spadai distribution of the locations for living, working and recreation and their mutual accessibility in the city. Different social levels of the quality of urban life result, (a) from different shares in the material resources of society and different positions in the social hierarchy, (b) different age, sex, nationality, life stage, employment, length of residence in a city or neighbourhood. Those things which the privileged, the employed, perceive as the quality of urban life may not necessarily be the same as those perceived by the poor, the dependent, and the unemployed. At best, there may be some specific components of the quality of urban life which may be seen as such by diametrically opposed groups. Even within the same social group, the quality of urban life is experienced differently, according to which locations in the city, in their own neighbourhood or outside of it, determine variously a person's daily routine (Kutter 1973). Different spadai levels of the perception and experience of the quality of urban life exist in metropolitan areas of different size and hence on a different scale: citywide, district, neighbourhood. This follows, among other things, (a) from the availability of shopping centres and public utilities (central places) at different distances and with different catchment areas, (b) from the selective use of the city by the inhabitants, depending on how their individual living, work, shopping and leisure time locations are distributed (Friedrichs, 1977). Accordingly, different factors effect the quality of urban life on the different spacial levels, and the sub-areas, especially the neighbourhoods, frequently exhibit very different characteristics from one another. These few distinctions should serve to provide an outline of what is to be understood by the quality of urban life, and to elucidate by a few examples the problem of adequately understanding it. It must be remembered that the basis of the quality of urban life is always an economic one. At the same time, the social, psychological and physical conditions which are primarily dealt with in this book, often exist in contradiction to the economic basis. Economic prosperity and the affluence it creates are just as much a source of the quality of urban life as also a root of its deterioration or even destruction. Conversely, the decline of a city sometimes releases forces and energies which produce quality as well as putting the basic assumptions about the quality of urban life into question. 4. The organization of this book is based on four research areas, which do not encompass the entire spectrum of the quality of urban life, but make essential basic points: social networks, ethnic minorities, man-environment relations, mental health. These four research areas overlap in countless points and I regard this as a considerable advantage for obtaining findings. The overlapping results on the one hand from the subject matter itself and on the other from the manner of dealing with it. By this is meant that three of the areas of research are dealt with by several disciplines, as is indicated by the different professional backgrounds of the authors. They have in common an awareness of the topical nature of the questions being

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asked and of the interdependence between the social and physical, societal and individual, municipal and neighbourhood components of the quality of urban life. Part A gives an introductory overview to 'The Quality of Urban Life' in the form of representative opinions by a sociologist, a psychologist and an urban planner. The sociologist, Manuel Castells, describes the economic forces which are presently determining the development of the city and points out the nature and extent of the restructuring which it is experiencing. He sees an entirely new pattern of production, consumption and management, which is causing decisive regional and urban effects and is leading to a dualism in regard to the quality of urban life. As far as urban design is concerned this is expressed for Castells in a neo-formalism, which is the design expression of the disintegration of the city as a social entity. The urban planner, Gabriele Scimemi, describes how the architecture and urban design of this century, especially the "Modern Movement" have influenced the present form of the city. He emphasizes the one-sidedness and misunderstanding of the "Modern Movement". It conceived urban planning not as an activity assisting the evolution or the transformation of cities, but rather as a totally creative activity which, starting from scratch, would aim at replacing the existing city with an entirely new city. The present phase of the physical design of the quality of urban life is characterized by uncertainty. Post-modernism, according to Scimemi, cannot claim to have fostered a consensus among its adherents on how to deal with the city as a whole. However, even when urban design by itself will not magically solve problems, nevertheless it is also necessary in future in order to promote "the spiritual correspondence between architectural forms and the cultural psychology of people" (Alain de Benoist). The psychologist, Harald M. Proshansky, together with Abbe K. Fabian, takes up the theme at this point, namely the Use of the City, and the meaning for its inhabitants. The primary focus of his concern is, on the one hand, the physical setting and the physical environment and all its spaces and places, and, on the other hand, the human activities that relate to these spaces and places. He asks the question whether the city helps people to realize their purposes and desires or thwarts them. In regard to the quality of urban life he describes basic conditions which must be carried out in practice for individuals or groups, and criteria, which are fundamental for the continued research into the relationships between urban residents and their physical world. In the following I have arranged the contributions to this book in sections according to their essential statements and comment on them from my own point of view as an urban planner. The sections are arranged according to the various spadai levels which exhibit the quality of urban life: - Supra-regional influences on the quality of life in the city - Social and spacial organization of the city - Transformation in the use of neighbourhoods - The concept of the "urban setting".

Overview:

Quality of Urban Life

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5. I have called the first section, Supra-Regional Influences on the Quality of Life in the City. It deals with the factors which concern the city as a whole and those which as a rule cannot be influenced by the urban population and its representatives. These factors are based on decisions made by the private sector and the government on a national and an international level. Castells (in this volume) describes current developments which are leading to a new hierarchy of functions and power positions nationwide and worldwide. Beyond a certain point, the quality of urban life in individual regions or cities seems scarcely of any interest to the business and government institutions which exercise economic power. This has the consequence of depriving those large metropolitan areas which do not have the benefit of large industries situated there and which, as a rule, have fewer resources and worse living conditions anyway, of any economic compensation for these facts. Even in more fortunate cities, the quality of life, which should be of prime importance to the employees of large firms, is often given little or no consideration. Nevertheless, there are a few urban centres, for instance, parts of Manhattan, in which the functions which cannot be automatized for the national and international economy are concentrated in the activities of highly qualified planning and management staff living in a central location (Castells 1985). Here an exclusive form of urban life is being visibly developed, which is demanded by and largely developed for a new gentry, or upwardly mobile citizens, usually single and between the ages of 25 and 40 (Brake 1985). The influence of the new international economy on cities and regions results in the loss of their autonomy vis-à-vis the worldwide economic order (Castells 1985). Because of this, individual measures undertaken by the regions and communities for the stabilization and further improvement of the quality of urban life are made even more difficult. Supra-regional and regional economic developments lead to migration. Large numbers of immigrants change the character of a region or city and thus become an important factor in urban life (Padilla in this volume: 101). Ever since the beginnings of the industrial age, large metropolitan areas have been centres of immigration and acculturation, providing more unwillingly than willingly the contextual framework for the entry of the majority of immigrants into industrial society (Wilpert in this volume: 135). In principle, this is still the case and the acculturation process of large ethnic minorities with its social and socio-cultural conflicts is thus a component of the development conditions of a region or city which are externally imposed. In addition to this, individual groups of minorities vary in their resistance to the pressure to assimilate and as a result create specific environmental demands in regard to their way of life (Rex in this volume: 128, 133). Due to the wideranging impact of external, economic, and social influences, it is imperative that we put regional or local measures for the benefit of the quality of urban life into a broader socio-cultural and primarily economic context (Sieverts in this volume: 182). Since even very progressive socio-cultural movements and

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campaigns have not yet had any direct impact on the centres of economic power (Pirella in this volume: 244), there remains for the regional or local planner nothing else to do but to fight for the stabilization and improvement of the quality of urban life trying to obtain through the interrelationship of government, community, nonprofit and private sector interests, some benefits for the city and its population (Fox in this volume: 238). 6 . 1 have called the second section, Social and. Spadai Organization of the City. This deals only on the periphery with the fact that every large city is divided into many districts and neighbourhoods which vary from one another in the mixture of uses, density, ground value, social structure, climate, and the beauty or otherwise of their buildings. Rather, we are dealing here with, (a) the increasing functional separation and social alienation between many of these neighbourhoods - that is, with the social and spacial segregation within the city, and (b) with the perception and relationship of many inhabitants of and to such neighbourhoods, their own and others, with which they are often only able to identify in a very limited way. Castells (in this volume: 15) identifies a process of increasing polarization within the great cities. What we are concerned with here is the development of different systems of production and social organization in one and the same city, which are equally dynamic yet profoundly different in the wealth, power, and prestige that they accumulate. This process is certainly further advanced in North America than it is in Western Europe, but deserves close attention here as well. One of these two systems conforms to the idea so highly acclaimed in official politics that work, success, and affluence as well as the enjoyment of the outward signs of material success determine life in the city. Those who belong to this system are in a position to ensure their standard of living within the framework of the existing institutions and modes of behaviour. The other system is directly connected with the crisis of the first system. Under certain circumstances, unemployment, failure, and poverty lead to new forms of organization for survival characterized by a shadow economy, moonlighting, selfhelp, and neighbourliness. They can, however, also lead to the gradual decrease in solidarity and to anomie. The people concerned create for themselves their own limited personal communities which provide them with a meaningful framework within which they can solve the problems of their day-to-day existence (Mitchell in this volume: 74). Within the process of polarization, increasingly different neighbourhoods develop which are appropriate to that which the people living in these systems both need and afford. There are still, particularly in Europe, sections of the population and urban neighbourhoods which are exempt from this polarization. For the most part a large section of the urban population from both systems can still identify with both the old inner city (insofar as it has not yet been taken over by the new gentry) and with the socially mixed neighbourhoods of reduced economic significance. Nevertheless, the great metropolis is on its way here too, within which

Overview: Quality of Urban Life

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two types of behaviour patterns, social groups, and cultures are connected with each other only on a physical basis, that is, a structural interdependency in a contradictory coexistence of different social, cultural and economic logics (Castells in this volume: 15). In connection with the polarization and the resulting segregation of different neighbourhoods, the immigrants, by which is meant the ethnic minorities, play a role. The fact that there are Mexican neighbourhoods in Los Angeles, Indian quarters in Birmingham, and Turkish neighbourhoods in West Berlin does not, of itself, explain anything. For (during the course of acculturation) ethnic groups also tend to split up within their own community along class-lines (Rex in this volume: 125). Consequently, the geographic concentration of ethnic groups in particular neighbourhoods is not synonymous with the establishment of a homogeneous community or colony situated in one location (Wilpert, in this volume: 140). What is needed here is an understanding of the processes involved in the mutual adaptation of immigrants and their hosts so as to be able to provide constructive recommendations that could lead to a reduction in the often reported tensions between immigrants and natives in major urban centres (Padilla in this volume: 119). The spacial division of the city into socially different neighbourhoods and districts occurs through a selection process in the course of which individuals and social groups look for, or are forced to look for, a place to live and a place to work within their economic and political limits. However, it is only within this framework that places are preferred on the basis of ecological, social and physical environmental quality (Rapoport in this volume: 160). The more this selection process proceeds according to economic criteria, the more the actual division of the city inevitably falls into different social levels from the choice of second, third or fifth best locations. Government action (for example, urban design and urban planning and housing policies) influences choice, sometimes even to the benefit of the stabilization of the quality of urban life for the largest number of inhabitants and locations. Yet, the drastic cuts in public spending and the uneven distribution of power in the cities at the present time leave little doubt as to where and for what purpose money will be invested and where not (Sieverts in this volume: 184). The experience of the quality of urban life, its presence or absence, within the given practical restrictions for the different social groups relates to the city as a whole as well as to its districts and neighbourhoods (Bonnes in this volume: 191; Schneider in this volume: 211). In the face of the tendency described above towards polarization, the question arises as to how long and for which individuals the idea of the city as a whole is still relevant and from which point onwards it is substituted for by the idea of a few isolated quarters which are used occasionally. In most of the metropolitan areas today the majority of the inhabitants still maintain a concept of the city as an entirety and the quality of urban life is experienced as the relationship of the whole city to its parts, especially those parts which the individual knows best and which are

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familiar or upon which he or she is dependent. The neighbourhoods themselves, where one lives or works, play a crucial role in the construction of the entire urban cognition (Bonnes in this volume: 198). Such "constructs" are, for example, the residential areas, the city centre, the outskirts (Bonnes in this volume: 198), or the suburb with a village atmosphere, and the high rise building estate (Schneider in this volume: 206). The experience of the city and the readiness to identify with it and its parts is connected to a set of single physical and social references (Schneider in this volume: 210) which convey a particular kind of continuity without which the quality urban life would not be conceivable. Knowledge of these references and their importance is decisive for dealing sensitively with the quality of urban life and for developing measures for its stabilization and further improvement. Architects, urban designers, and planners have a lot to learn here (Rapoport in this volume: 172). The old dream of the professional architect of bringing the incredibly intricate maze of problems which beset the modern city under control through a grand single gesture is no help, neither is the new tendency of concentrating on individual buildings and "small matters" and leaving the neighbourhood and the city as a whole to take care of itself (Scimemi in this volume: 38, 45). 7.1 have called the third section, The Transformation in the Use of Neighbourhoods. The urban neighbourhood is the classic order of magnitude by which the quality of urban life is represented and expressed. The availability of the quality of urban life in its multiplicity and complexity, is experienced most directly in the neighbourhood as distinct from the individual home and work place and the immediate surrounding open space. In the most favourable cases a considerable part of the daily urban living situation, although varying for the different age and social groups, occurs and is experienced in the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood most nearly recalls and compares with the living conditions of historical settlements and cities, and neighbourhoods of the pre-industrial age, and the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, this memory, as important as it is, also awakes illusions as to the possibilities available for present and future living quality in urban neighbourhoods. For, there are considerable differences in the general economic and social, regional and overall urban preconditions existing today as compared to those which existed in former times. These are inevitably reflected in urban neighbourhoods according to their social structure and according to which of the two systems of production and social organization emerging in the large metropolitan areas (see above) they belong to. The activities of the neighbourhood people, whether in private or in public, inside or outside, in the neighbourhood itself or outside of it, have all changed fundamentally in the last 200 years and are continuing to do so. A large part of the functions which the neighbourhood community performed for the individual or for the group and which were supported by features of the buildings or the open spaces, have disappeared from the local scene and have been taken over by special institutions (Sodeur in this volume: 63). Earning a living, education and training, care of the old and the sick, birth and death, rarely now occur in the home; trade and commerce,

Overview: Quality of Urban Life

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conversation and interaction, games and fun, just as rarely in the streets. T h e various facilities seem to be carefully separated f r o m each other so that crossing, with possible conflicts and the chance of social contact are avoided (Sodeur in this v o l u m e : 64). A t first sight, the neglect of open space as a spatial dimension in its own right, so characteristic of modern town planning, appears to be an adequate answer to the considerably reduced significance of social interaction in neighbourhoods (Sieverts in this v o l u m e : 180). H o w e v e r , there are, as I have already mentioned, very different neighbourhoods in the great modern metropolitan areas. W e have, t h e r e f o r e , to differentiate. T h e appearance of the open spaces in the residential areas of the well-off and affluent, those w h o belong to one of the t w o systems, gives the impression of being sterile and esthetically "tarted up". (Sieverts in this volume: 185). T h e social distance which is thereby expressed is deliberate. In the eyes of the residents, the value of these residential areas lies in their peace and quiet, their seclusion, the absence of nuisances, the pleasant architectural and natural surroundings, the visible expression of social status, material success, and having made a g o o d investment. In no single w a y do these areas correspond to the idealization of the urban neighbourhood as envisaged by so many urban planners. T h e residents, w h o have enough time and m o n e y , obtain the experience of urban life outside of their own residential area in the functional and esthetically pleasing, sometimes simple, inner city areas, in which public space is reduced to the functions of leisure and shopping (Castells 1985). T h e appearance of the open spaces in many older residential areas, w h e r e the p o o r e r , underprivileged inhabitants, those who belong to the other system, reside, illustrates a vital and alive appropriation of the open spaces by the residents f o r their o w n usage (Sieverts in this v o l u m e : 185). O n e reason f o r this is that these residents are m o r e restricted in their social and physical f r e e d o m of m o v e m e n t and, therefore, are m o r e obviously dependent on their neighbourhood surroundings. H e n c e , it is even m o r e important that they be supplied with information which will help them to b e able to understand or to put particular events or situations into context better. Such information constitutes one of the most important forms of social support, especially in times of uncertainty or ambiguity (Badura in this v o l u m e : 58). F o r less privileged citizens the making available of such information can best be achieved within their daily surroundings, in other words, in their own neighbourhood. In many places this is the prerequisite f o r a satisfactory and well-defined social network. Outside of their own or similar residential areas they f e e l strange and f o r those w h o d o not fit into the general functional assignment of w o r k and residence, public space becomes a "space of w a n d e r i n g " (Castells 1985). W h e n such urban residents w e r e transplanted into modern high rise buildings in the 1960s and 1970s, their problems w e r e usually only made worse ( H e i l 1971), because in these neighbourhoods no appropriate social network had d e v e l o p e d and could not d e v e l o p f o r various reasons, such as the short period of residence and insufficient

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support from the physical urban structure. Yet, the quality of the older residential areas of the underprivileged is also regarded by their residents in an ambivalent manner. On the one hand they are often conscious of the informal social supportiveness, of the neighbourliness and solidarity which they experience in such neighbourhoods, while on the other hand they feel déclassé due to their unsatisfactory living conditions and the often dilapidated condition of the buildings and open spaces, not to mention the lack of public facilities and the bad image their neighbourhood has. The romantic glorification often bestowed on such milieus by outsiders is inexplicable to those who live in them. As a rule these neighbourhoods possess more urban character than many residential areas which are lived in by the more privileged members of society, but this urban character is a specifically restricted version of the quality of urban life and constitutes, moreover, the romantic reverse of social backwardness (Sieverts in this volume: 178). This urban character depends not least of all upon the limited social and physical freedom of movement possessed by the less affluent members of society, since that which occurs in neighbourhood open space will be the subset of the interaction and communication that does not occur elsewhere (Rapoport in this volume: 168). At the same time, the question arises of how to deal with the old and the newly created minorities (created, that is, by social change), with the aged, the permanently unemployed, the cronically sick, the mentally ill, criminals. At the present time we can witness discrimination and resocialization policies, which are partially motivated by economic necessity, existing side by side, relieving one another. A significant example of this is the experiment of the Italian health service reform, especially in psychiatry (Pirella in this volume). In dealing with one or the other of the different types of urban residential areas and the intermediate gradations which, particularly in European cities, have often survived, the role which is alloted to the residents and the role which they assume for themselves is quite obviously of supreme importance. Citizens' participation movements, which expand and decline but which nevertheless have achieved a certain degree of permanence in several large cities can provide psychological, physical and economic improvements. An example of this is the creation and protection of open space resources which benefit not only the participants in such movements but also the local community and the city as a whole (Fox in this volume: 235). 8. I have named the fourth section, The Concept of the "Urban Setting". An urban neighbourhood can be described as a system of "settings" (Rapoport in this volume: 167) connected by a particular space and field of action. Settings are constituted out of spaces and places and the activities which regularly take place in them. A system of activities can be ascertained as being performed in a system of settings. The activity systems are primarily culturally based in the sense that they are the result of unwritten rules, customs and habits, the prevailing life style, and the definition of which activities are considered appropriate to given settings (Rapoport in this

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volume: 163). The experience and the behaviour of the individual are related to the fixed-feature elements of the spaces and places which constitute a setting. To put these relationships into a stucture requires primarily a direct interest in the nature of physical setting, its real world properties, who uses it, what happens to it, and how all this is related to the day-to-day behaviour and experience of the individual (Proshansky and Fabian in this volume: 20). The setting 2 can be regarded as the smallest social and physical unit by which the presence or absence of the quality of urban life can be investigated, explained and, if necessary, improved. The various settings which constitute a neighbourhood are only partially manifest as such; they exist as a physical space or place but not always as a social event occurring regularly and over a longer period of time. Nevertheless, they may still be important even if they are seldom or not at all used (Rapoport in this volume: 160). On the one hand this provides a choice of settings for the urban resident. On the other hand the use or non-use of a setting implies that things should be done to achieve certain characteristics which, in turn, are supportive of the desired uses or activities. Where and when certain activities take place or not is dependent upon the supportiveness and appropriateness of a setting (Rapoport in this volume: 163). In order to explain and possibly change the contribution a setting makes to the quality of urban life, it is essential to determine those elements, relations, or components of the setting which are perceived as such by the users and can be influenced by them. Only the portion of the environment consciously selected through the process of cognitive representation becomes relevant to the planned action. It is still necessary, however, to establish how the users transform an aggregate of elements into a whole that is meaningful for human behaviour and actions (Bonnes in this volume: 189, 197). A completely developed setting is characterized by an existing milieu and ongoing activities (Rapoport in this volume: 163). The milieu is chiefly characterized by the social network of those concerned. Those properties of such networks are of particular interest which are connected with the physical environment (Sodeur in this volume: 65) and by means of which a part of the milieu can be described. It is from the specific components of the built environment, the spaces and places where action and behaviour, social interaction and communication take place (or not) that those specific components of environmental quality and the characteristics applicable to the particular subset of activities and their settings and indeed those components which can be controlled by urban designers or planners (Rapoport in this volume: 160) occur. In the setting, the presence or absence of the quality of urban life is presented as a complex problem of the man-environment relationship and thus, simultaneously, the relationships between individuals, as a microcosm representative of the whole city. It is not only the macro-level of problems connected with the quality or urban life which is important but equally so the micro-level (Günter in this volume: 254). The 2 In connection with the concept "setting" see Rapoport in this volume: 163.

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recent phase of urban design and planning has taught us that the neglect of the small scale, the urban design details, to the benefit of the large scale uses and locations together with the technical infrastructure has had a devastating e f f e c t on the quality of urban life. F o r , the city inhabitants establish their access to and identity with the city chiefly by means of events in individual, comprehensible spaces and places, that is to say, in the settings, as long as the aggregations of these settings into neighbourhoods, urban districts etc., is ascertainable to them in a social and spacial sense. H e n c e , the concern with setting has a very great significance f o r the stabilization and further improvement of the quality of life in the great metropolitan areas.

References Brake, K. (1985). Aktuelle Tendenzen der Stadtentwicklung in New York City. Wiederbelebung einer Stadt und ihrer sozialen Konflikte, in K. Brake (Ed.), Bericht über eine Exkursion nach New York. Oldenburg: Universität Oldenburg, Studiengang Raumplanung. Castells, M. (1985). Technological Change, Economic Restructuring, and the UrbanRegional Process, in Regional and Country Studies Branch U N I D O and The Interdisciplinary Institute of Urban and Regional Studies of the University of Economics, Vienna (Eds.), International Economic Restructuring and the Territorial Community. Wien: United Nations Industrial Development Organization ( U N I D O ) . Friedrichs, J. (1977). Stadtanalyse. Soziale und räumliche Organisation der Gesellschaft. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Heil, K. (1971). Kommunikation und Entfremdung. Menschen am Stadtrand. Legende und Wirklichkeit. Stuttgart/Bern: Krämer. Kutter, E. (1973). A Model for Individual Travel Behaviour. Urban Studies, 10, 235-258.

1. The New Urban Crisis Manuel

Castells

Thirty years ago, when the problem of reconstruction and large-scale development were prevailing, cities in Europe and particularly in Germany were in an extremely different situation than that which exists today. From this standpoint I will try to underline the dramatic changes that the economy, the culture, the politics have undergone and therefore the entirely new context in which the theory and practice of urban planning and design will take place. In that sense, I think the use of sociology for planning is to provide the understanding of the social process which underlies the city as a living entity. I think that most of the planning procedures and most of the urban theories have been working on a series of assumptions that today cannot be sustained any longer, at least in our societies in areas of the advanced capitalist countries - namely Western Europe and North America. I think that the assumptions of urban theory in the last 30 years were of a sustained rate of high economic growth that today is either reversed or at least extremely uneven between regions and cities. It was also based on the assumption that migration will continue, that the process of metropolitan growth will continue forever, and that therefore the problem of planning was how to contain and how to organize the endless flow of people and activities coming into some large metropolitan areas. Today we know that a number of metropolitan areas have stopped growing; others grow at a much slower pace. So, we observe slower economic growth, slow metropolitan growth, reversal of the migration trends in most countries, and also a fundamental change in cultural values - values, in which the search for meaningful space is more important than the search for rational and functional urban structure. The new values enhance a space where the revival of history and the invention of new history in some cases is more crucial than the demolition of historical forms to adapt to new functions. These changes had been already taken into consideration in a number of economic and technological policies which are dramatically reshaping our world. The most important trends are the economic and technological restructuring which followed the crisis of the 1970s, both in Europe and in North America, and which created an entirely new pattern of production, consumption, and management with decisive regional and urban effects.. To some extent, and being very schematic, we are not in an economic crisis any more.

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And this will be shocking and surprising for most people, because, in fact, from the perspective of people's lives we are in a terrible crisis in many countries and will be so for a long time. But the system is in crisis not because there is misery, because there is exploitation, because there is oppression - this is to some extent the norm of our wonderful civilization. The system is in crisis when it is not able to reach its goals by the means it allows for the fulfillment of these goals. And under these conditions the system was in crisis in the 1970s. But through a series of political victories by the conservative forces, the system is going through the crisis and superseding the crisis through a number of reorganizations of basic relationships in which the coming of a technological revolution has greatly contributed to the solving of the problems. These techno-economic restructurings have tremendous urban and regional impacts. The first one is the new relationship being established between capital and labor in the production process. Basically, one could say that the social contract reached between capital and labor in all advanced capitalist countries for many many years has been broken. In other words: capital has created better conditions for obtaining profits, and therefore for triggering again the process of investment. This is not a capitalist conspiracy, it is simply a healthy capitalist logic in terms of superseding the obstacles in terms of wages, in terms of working conditions, in terms of regulation, when these social concessions were hampering the engine of capitalist growth - that is, profit and therefore investment. In that sense, I am not addressing the problem in moral terms but in terms of a logic that was stalled and is now being reactivated on the basis of renewed sources of the ability of appropriating labor with the costs of production, which are being decisively lowered through two basic means: first, by imposing working conditions and wage conditions in the name of austerity. Second, through the impact of technologies that tremendously enhance productivity while at the same time undermining the ability of labor to oppose some policies, because workers can be easily (and will be easily) replaced by robots - at the machine level, at the factory level, and at the office level. The technological revolution is not an evil in itself; machines do not suppress jobs. But they do suppress working time, which is something very different. The problem is that, given a social organization and given the particular situation under which the economic crisis happened, this technological revolution has been used to create conditions under which labor will be replaced by machines, specially unionized labor, which is expensive, because it is unionized. It is being replaced all over the world - either by "second-class" workers (namely immigrants, minorities, women, and youth) or by machines. This creates a situation in which, though the global rate of growth is lower in general than in preceding periods, there is still substantial economic growth in some sectors, in certain sectors of course in high-technology industries, but even more than that in advanced services, which are the ones that are leading the new economic growth - and at the same time there are also other sectors, linked to the so-called informal economy or semi-informal economy, that is the economy which is unregulated by the state, whose working conditions are much worse than what they were in the same sectors 10

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or 15 years ago. Thus, we observe a dynamic group of highly concentrated sectors of high-technology industries, advanced corporate services, which are creating a new dynamism which employs a substantial portion of the population, though the proportion of the employed active population varies with the place of each country in the international division of labor. Through the connection of all these segments, we can observe the formation of a dynamic dominant pole of growth, which then translates into booming Manhattan, into the development of new directional centers in some European cities, into highly-paid professionals and technicians that then can hire an army of "personal services" at different levels from nice restaurants to Xerox machines, small shops, etc. Thus, the dynamic pool induces also the growth of services both of production and consumption around this sector of growth. Therefore, we observe growth at the top, and also growth at the bottom, in terms of this underground informal economy or semi-informal economy around the sprawling sweatshops of the world. In the middle, the traditional automobile workers or the traditional steelworkers are being evicted from the labor market because they are expensive enough to be suppressed by machines and not skilled enough and not, interesting enough to be integrated into the new dynamic growth of high-technology industries. The translation of this process into the urban structure is the creation of dualism - not only within countries but within cities and within metropolitan areas. This dualism in fact is the consequence of the polarized growth; it is not only wealth and misery, it refers to different forms of growth and the decomposition of entire sectors of society and therefore of the city under the impact of this two-fold process which attacks the core of the industrial economy. In that sense, cities disappear in a constellation of segments of urban structure which then are apprehended on a pointby-point basis. When cities and metropolitan areas become so (to use the typical example of New York, namely Manhattan and the South Bronx) at the same time and within the same system, we are in the process of urban schizophrenia - but in a process of urban schizophrenia that, in design terms, translates into the rehabilitation of one building or of one neighborhood, because the entire picture of the city cannot be controlled any more. To some extent, neo-formalism is the design expression of the disintegration of the city as a social entity. The second axis of this restructuring is the transformation of the role of the state in the economy. It is not that we cannot afford any more public spending. It is that the social and economic goals of this public spending have changed. I summarize this process using an old formula that, in a different context and with a different intention, Herbert Marcuse used many years ago: that is, the transition from the Welfare State to the Warfare State. The fact that, on the one hand, we observe the dismantlement of the entire system of social expenditures because we cannot afford them any more - but that, on the other hand, we can afford (and not only in the United States, but also in several European countries) an increase in the military budget. Technological development and the high-technology industries are spurred precisely by military investment. It doesn't mean that the majority of high tech-

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nology has a military market. It does mean that the core and the trigger of the process relies on the military market and on the military specifications of the products. This transformation of the state and of the public sector, around military and paramilitary expenditures, translates into cities and regions very directly. They imply the shrinkage of the urban services and therefore the abandonment of large areas in many cities as well as in declining regions. It is also the increasing process of uneven development between those regions that are suitable to this kind of development and those regions that are not. And even within regions, within metropolitan areas, we also observe a tremendous difference of dynamism between those areas incorporated into the pole of growth and those areas which are in fact part of the old declining system and which are not taken into consideration any more by the Welfare State. Just to give one example of one region that is considered as being at the top of the process of growth, the San Francisco Bay Area, there is Silicon Valley on the one hand, but there is also the Oakland Ghetto on the other hand, which is less suitable for development or high-tech industries, not for technical or locational reasons but for social reasons. So, on the one hand we have people crowding into the Silicon Valley, and engineers at the top level paying 50% of their income to find housing there or travelling two hours a day in a polluted environment within the Silicon Valley area. On the other hand we have the wasteland in the middle of the Oakland Ghetto, without economic revival. Also, studies on the new spatial hinterland that develops in the nuclear and military installations show the ruins of an urban civilization that is left to its demise. The third major process we are observing, in the process of restructuring in our societies, is the acceleration of the new international division of labor - which, on the one hand, is the fact of the multinationals and also of national governments trying to take advantage of the most favorable conditions of production and distribution in each country (therefore removing the obstacles for production where the social control becomes too tight). On the other hand, it is certainly favored by the new technologies of communication and transportation which allow most of the economic activity to be footloose in technical terms. This new international division of labor creates at the spatial level a landscape of what I call variable geometry, where flows change according to different patterns of investments and to different social and economic conditions of production in each country. So, to some extent, we shift in functional and economic terms from a space of localities to a space of flows. This does not mean that places disappear, but this does mean that, from the point of view of the dominant logic, of the logic of the power organizations, we shift to a space of flows which therefore are not historically rooted or socially rooted to any particular place. This is a tendency; this does not mean that places disappear; I emphasize this. It does mean that the dominant logic intends to transform places into flows. To those major processes of techno-economic restructuring, one should add (to have an accurate picture of the deep transformations we are undergoing) other structural tendencies that are crucial in this historical moment. One is the direct impact of new

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technologies on the spatial forms which (to be extremely schematic) could produce at least three types of effects. In terms of functions, work, services, there is a tendency, there could be a tendency toward the spatial diffusion of functional activities through intra-metropolitan or inter-metropolitan telecommunication connections. In terms of everyday life, the coming of the electronic home could - and again, I emphasize could - trigger a reinforcement of the tendencies toward the individualization of personal life and of the closing of the personal home, which would receive all these sounds and images of the entire galaxy through all kinds of connections - while being closed to the neighbors' access! Again here the problem is not the technology, it is the action of an extremely powerful technology in a social vacuum which is a crisis of our civilization. And, because cities become increasingly abstract, increasingly transformed into flows, we observe a tendency toward the dissolution of the historic space of the city, of the cultural roots of the city, which is to some extent reshaped both by the abstraction of the flows and by the coming of new cultures that do not connect with the historical culture of the city. This process is reinforced by some basic cultural changes which our urban structure is not prepared to absorb. It has been a dramatic change in the family structure, and in the role in the family, which has not been fitted by the existence of the built environment. In other words, the built environment still assumes Mama, Daddy, and the two children, when in fact we know an increasing proportion of people live alone (25% in the United States as a whole, 53% in the city of San Francisco - which is admittedly a special case). But the tendency, both because of the demographical structure toward the aging of the population, and because of changing patterns, is that the nuclear family as such, culturally speaking, is increasingly less the unit of our daily life. And yet, the whole housing structure is built on this concept of the traditional nuclear patriarchal family. Besides, my studies on informal economy pinpoint that, the more the underground economy develops, the more the family that becomes important is the extended family (because the extended family is the mechanism to find jobs, to obtain solidarity, and to find opportunities to enter the labor market). So, between the economic tendency toward the extended family and the cultural tendency toward individualization, the traditional patriarchal nuclear family is in crisis - yet, our architects still build for it. Finally, there is also a crisis of the relationship between culture and politics that has not been taken into consideration in our cities. In the last 15 years, we have observed the rise of a series of urban social movements that propose a number of values, both in terms of collective consumption and in terms of the ecological approach. But these movements, the more they have been unable to obtain their expression within the political structure, the more they have turned to a negative mood, the mood of explosions, to a mood of defensive space, to a mood of revolts in which the affirmation of identity without negotiation or simply the reaction against the violence of the system is expressed at a very primitive level. And in that sense, given the

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inability of urban and other social movements to deeply transform the social institutions in many countries and in many cities, they have turned to the selfaffirmation of irreducible identity. And, therefore, we are confronted with the threat that our world will be divided, very much in spatial terms, between the spaceless logic of multinational flows and the place-oriented, locality-based culture, of neighborhood groups that only see their neighborhood and only care about their neighborhood, because it is the only thing they can control. In other words, when people cannot control the world, they shrink the world to the size of their possibilities of control, namely their neighborhood. If we live in a situation where the power is placeless, where the power is abstract and ahistorical, and where the alternative to such a power is only place-oriented, and only oriented to specific identities, then the patterns of communications are broken down, and, under these conditions, cities disappear - and maybe societies will too.

2. Psychological Aspects of the Quality of Urban Life Harold M. Proshansky and Abbe K. Fabian

1 Introduction The task of specifying the psychological aspects or determinants of urban life, or if you will, the metropolis, is by no means a simple one. Indeed, it is complex and becomes even more so in any attempt to deal with it in a short presentation. The problem is that to ask this question in the first place - "What are the psychological aspects of the quality of urban life?" - is to ask not one question but many. However, even with adequate time and resources to deal with this question in all its complexity, We do not believe that a coherent picture and understanding of the psychological factors that contribute to, or determine the quality of life in a large urban setting could be agreed upon. Psychologists, environmental and otherwise, have not really undertaken to develop enough theory or research in this area, and they differ in their findings, as well as in their conceptual and theoretical orientations to what is meant by "quality," "urban life," and even as to what constitutes scientific psychological research. You can rest easy. We have no desire to review the theoretical and empirical differences among psychologists, nor would much be gained by this analysis. What we will do is to focus on some critical issues and conceptions that must necessarily be considered in any attempt to answer the question of the psychological aspects of the quality of urban life - at least insofar as one environmental psychologist is concerned. What will emerge, we hope, is a kind of "blueprint" or analytic guidebook for both practitioners and behavioral science researchers who must deal with this kind of question. For the researcher it should help in setting the precise nature and boundaries for his or her research ; and for the practitioner it should provide a deeper and clearer understanding of what a psychological analysis of the quality of urban life actually means. Before turning to the blueprint let us explain briefly the boundaries that we, as environmental psychologists, place on any analysis of the question of the psychological determinants of the quality of an urban life. To begin with, the primary and essential focus of our concern is the physical setting and, more particularly, the built environment and all of its spaces, places, and the human activities that relate to these spaces and places. This immediately sets us apart from social, developmental, and

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other types of psychologists. However, like all other psychologists, our primary level of analysis is the individual and, more precisely, the experience and behavior of that individual in relation to the properties of those spaces and places that constitute the urban setting. But the search for relationships between the person and physical setting is a two-way street: the opportunities and limitations provided by the properties of the built environment are no more or less important than that which the individual experiences, and how he or she behaves in that environment. One side of the question simply cannot be considered in any fruitful way without the other. Finally, you should also know that as we are environmental psychologists we are not interested in the search for general or universal principles of human behavior and experience in relation to physical settings. We are interested in the patterning of relationships between the two, which requires a direct concern with the substantive nature of a physical setting: what its real world properties are, who uses it, what happens to it, and how all this is related to the day-to-day behavior and experience of the person. This means that neither the laboratory nor the simulation model has a high priority, if any at all, in our approach, and in this respect simple cause and effect relationships are of little value or significance. To provide a framework or blueprint for the analysis of the psychological determinants of the quality of urban life, certain types of issues must be addressed. The first is the question of what is meant by quality in the context of the term "Quality of Urban Life;" the second concerns how we conceptualize the physical world of the city; and, finally, there is the individual, and the critical issue of how we relate him or her to this physical world for the purpose of assessing its quality.

2 The Meaning of the Quality of Urban Life The concept of "quality of urban life" emerged during the late 1960's and early 1970's when the environmental crisis became a major national issue not only in the United States but around the world. Since that time the term continues to be used by behavioral scientists, government personnel, design practitioners, and still others. What is no less apparent is that the term is not one that is easily defined and indeed its meaning varies with those who use it. However, despite the differences in what the "quality of urban life" connotes to different researchers and practitioners, all of us have an intuitive grasp of a common general meaning that underlies all the more precise or specific uses of the term. To put the matter simply, quality of urban life is always concerned with whether people live well or poorly. Is life easy or hard? Are people satisfied or dissatisfied? Does the city help them realize their purposes and desires, or does it thwart them? When we ask the more specific questions of what we must do and how we must go

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about improving the quality of urban life, it is then that the very different meanings that have accrued to this concept are revealed. It may range from an emphasis on adequate services for those who live in the city, to concerns with economic matters including employment, income, and future economic development, to concerns with the level of satisfaction of family life and other social interactions. We would argue that not only are these differences in specific meanings of the quality of urban life to be expected, but it would make no sense to attempt to find some common unifying definition. The very nature of urban life, its people, social groups, institutions, activities, objectives and goals, requires that the concept of quality be a multidimensional one which subsumes a host of specific definitions varying in meaning and the extent of their application to the city and its inhabitants. Said in another way, quality of urban life must necessarily be defined by researchers, designers, architects, or government officials according to the "slice of urban life" that each defines as being essential. We are not suggesting there be as many definitions of quality of urban life as there are problems, interests, or approaches. On the other hand we do believe that the search for " t h e " definition or a common definition is not only undesirable but is theoretically unsound. Furthermore, it is of little value for any group of researchers or practitioners to set priorities by claiming that a given set of aspects of urban life considered from a particular point of view are the most important. If we turn to research and theory in the behavioral sciences - environmental psychology, social psychology, sociology or anthropology - the same is true. However, within a broad problem area of a given behavioral science field some agreement on quality of life is necessary. But even here one can expect differences if one researcher's theoretical emphasis is placed on family and household existence, whereas another's emphasis is on community life and intergroup experience. Thus, rather than posing the question, "What are the psychological aspects of the quality of urban life?", we would suggest a more reasonable and answerable q u e s t i o n - "What kinds of quality, for what kinds of people, in what kinds of places?" Out of such understanding we may be in a little better position to order the importance of these dimensions, better grasp their relationships to each other, and above all be in a better position to plan and execute changes in urban life which will indeed improve its quality.

3 Issues in Describing the Physical Environment For the environmental psychologist the nexus of analysis and understanding of the quality of life of an urban environment is its physical settings. These settings, in turn, are the geographical loci of interrelated spaces and places that organize, define, and determine the existence of those living in the city.

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and Abbe K. Fabian

The issue to be stressed and clarified, however, is that urban life is more than the organization and integration of a variety of physical settings. It not only consists of people who engage in a wide range of activities in these various physical contexts, but those individuals and activities are in turn organized and defined by larger integrative normative social structures. These normative social systems consist of defined relationships between individuals, groups of individuals, and larger social institutions all of which express the basic goals and values of a society. Thus, the environmental psychologist is equally concerned with what people do, feel, and think as individuals and in relationship to each other in the built environment. If at root the physical setting both as a physical and social context is the primary concern of the environmental psychologist, how, it may be asked, does he or she approach the task of describing this setting when it is an urban metropolis? The environmental psychologist begins with the fundamental view that the conceptualization of physical settings must reflect their real world nature; their integrity as objective events and their meanings derived from these events for those who use them must be maintained. Since our concern is with both the ability to describe and to understand the relationships between the functioning person and his physical setting, the emphasis must be on the content of these relationships rather than on the psychological and cultural processes underlying them. Taking such a position in and of itself is not enough, obviously. How do we decide and select such content? To begin with, particular classes of physical settings assume critical importance because indeed the very nature of our social system and its norms and values gives these settings the highest priority in urban life. Two types of settings that dominate the existence of individuals in a complex industrialized society are the home and household and the workplace·, and in such a society each of these bears an important relationship to what we call the school or educational setting. Their significance in urban life is patent, and that their physical properties make an important contribution to some dimensions of the quality of urban life represents an almost self-evident truth. Of special interest is the fact that individuals spend a good deal of time in these settings in any given day, and this daily experience extends over long periods of time in the life cycle of the person. However, what is often ignored in consideration of these three types of settings are the physical and functional interrelationships. The movement from one of these physical settings to the next and back raises important questions about the influence of their properties on each other. For example, is the low quality of life in a home setting intrusive with respect to the child's experience in a far superior physical setting of the school? If we examine the implications of our analysis of urban physical settings up to this point, then other physical setting concepts emerge from it. Clearly, the relationships between and among these three major settings are in part a function of the means available for the person to move from one to the other. Transportation systems,

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paths of individual movement, and other related public spaces must be included in the conceptualization of the physical world of the city. While the person spends far less time, relatively speaking, in his or her neighborhood streets, trains, cars, buses, and other means that allow for mobility in urban settings, this does occur repeatedly and indeed is part of the ritualized pattern of activities of daily life. Thus, in evaluating quality of urban life, the question must be asked, to take but one example, not simply what does the average subway rider experience on any given day, but rather what are the meaning and consequences of the experience repeated on a daily basis for many years. Urban life involves a host of what may best be called specialized physical settings that also help to define the quality of that life. The very nature of a modern urban existence which requires that the individual or the family work in one place and live in another depends on these specialized settings as other support systems serving the school-home-workplace connection. We are referring to hospitals, food and clothing stores, government offices, libraries, museums, parks and theaters, restaurants, police and other security mechanisms such as prisons, and still more. If we add to this mosaic of spaces and places still others of lesser importance and of a more specialized function (e.g., skating rink, health club, etc.) then it becomes clear that the urban setting must to some degree be conceptualized in structural as well as substantive terms. Here, in this brief presentation we can only point to some relevant structural properties. The distance between and among particular spaces and places of the city is an important physical property and is perhaps the most evident of these structural properties. But there are others which are of considerable importance as well. Physical settings of a particular kind in an urban community may vary in number to such an extent that the structural concept of differentiation may be involved in the person's perception of these settings. Think of 200 buildings in a square mile compared to fifty. And within an urban community itself there may be many more different types of settings than in another such community, so that diversity of settings is often another structural feature that should be considered. Diversity, of course, is also an issue for a given type of setting (e.g., types of households) within a given urban community, and when differentiation and diversity are considered together the property of complexity of the physical settings of the urban context emerges. Finally, complexity itself, that is, the differentiation and diversity of physical settings in a major urban community implies the structural quality of integration. Does the constellation of physical settings that constitute an urban community make sense or show coherence insofar as their relevant purposes, distance-locations, and functional capacities are concerned? An urban residential area that has a large number of stores and businesses of much the same type (e.g., restaurants, but not groceries, barbers, etc.), is far less coherent or integrated than an area which shows the appropriate diversity.

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A t least one m o r e very important but quite difficult consideration remains. In many respects it may b e the most difficult one to deal with, whether the task is simply description and conceptualization or systematic research. Physical settings are subject to change over time. Time then becomes an important dimension in the analysis of u r b a n settings. While we would not like to extend the analogy too far, physical settings have a life cycle not unlike the person. They are planned, develop, change, and indeed may eventually disappear. Thus, there obviously must be a "fit", " m a t c h " , or coherence between the person and his physical setting, but that coherence must be examined over the "life cycle" of both. It is not only that physical settings change and therefore become dysfunctional for the people who use t h e m , but people also change over time and thus may become dysfunctional for their physical settings. If we consider, for example, the person's need to be with and relate to others, then the appropriate physical settings for this purpose, such as a community center, may no longer be able to serve this p u r p o s e if the surrounding neighborhood shows a sharp increase in street crime. But it is also true that as the population of an area changes, the new community m e m b e r s with close family ties may have little need to seek out affiliations outside the h o m e . I n d e e d , at least for the large urban community, affiliation conceived in terms of such early values as neighborhoods and "local community life" may be replaced by professional and occupational affiliations and c o m m o n interest or purpose affiliations. T h e matter of time in conceptualizing quality of life in physical settings in cities is by no means a simple task. H o w e v e r , the difficulty in including it in the environmental analysis of these settings in no way dilutes or mitigates its importance. O n e way or the other it has to be properly conceptualized and integrated in our description and conception of the quality of urban life.

4 Issues in the Definition of the Person So much of m o d e r n psychology has developed both in its theory and research a r o u n d the conception that behavior and experience, whether transient or in relation to enduring patterns of response, were far more a function of the nature of the person than the environment. For environmental psychology this was neither possible nor desirable. To focus on person/physical setting relationships meant that this world or setting had to b e an integral and equal part of the theory and research that would eventually cumulate as knowledge in this field. This kind of commitment then brings us to a critical issue which has clear relevance to the analysis of the quality of u r b a n life. A r e physical settings to be conceived of as objective environments, or, on the other hand, are they a matter of how individuals

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perceive, think, and feel about them? Thus, according to Gornitsky and others there has been much controversy over whether the quality of urban life should be an objective concept or a subjective one. This is clearly a specious, indeed, a meaningless distinction. The answer is that it is a matter of both the actual properties of physical settings and how they are perceived and experienced by the individual. The attempt to separate the objective and subjective or to give emphasis to one rather than the other is often a function of the kind of quality of life problem that is studied. And this occurs because theoretical predilections or approaches in environmental psychology or the other fields of psychology set a priority in which one particular methodological approach is considered to be superior to another. Undoubtedly, many assumptions about what an ideal world for all individuals is like can safely be made. There are commonalities of experience and response that minimize the influence of so-called unique individual or even subgroup influences. However, safe as these assumptions may be, some "testing" of them from time to time via user perceptions and beliefs may be necessary. On the other hand, as we leave the realm of commonalities and give emphasis to quality of urban life, then it cannot be stressed too much that subj ective analysis is crucial. Whether in the design, use, or evaluation of a setting, how individuals think and feel about it becomes a central factor in understanding their behavior in that setting. It is, however, at just this point that some environmental psychologists get into difficulty. A focus on subjective psychological analysis in no way mitigates the concern that must be given to the objective world and its properties. This world has consequences in the behavior and experience of the person quite often without his awareness of these changes taking place. Under these circumstances the individual can neither identify nor verbalize these influences, and indeed it is only by objective analysis of the "observer" that this influence of the physical environment on the person's behavior and experience can be determined. Urban life, for example, involves sight, sound, and activity of considerable intensity. It is simple and proper to assume that how the individual perceives and experiences the "pace" of urban life is critical in understanding its influence on him. That many individuals enjoy the excitement and intensity of urban life in this respect cannot be denied. Others, of course, do in fact experience it as unpleasant, painful, and perhaps even threatening. However, for those who enjoy city life in this way, it also may be that they are exerting more effort, experiencing more tension, and indeed being subjected to stress and consequent behavioral reactions in the form of irritability and fatigue. It is evident that with respect to quality of life, the influences of physical settings on the behavior and experience of the person that bypass awareness and interpretation by the individual cannot and should not be ignored. We turn now to issues of individual behavior and experience with the focus on the person. As in our analysis of the physical setting, we can only provide some conceptual markers that we believe have both applied and heuristic value in

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considerations of the quality of urban life. These markers or concepts can be distinguished for purposes of analysis in terms of the particular nature of the person's relationship with his or her physical setting. They are rough distinctions and indeed overlapping, but they are useful in any concern with psychological determinants of the quality of urban life. To begin with, we can conceive of the person as a perceivingfeeling organism. In plainer terms the individual has both the senses to detect his physical world and the emotions to respond to this world depending on what is sensed. Light, sound, temperature, touch, and weight or pressure are indeed all matters that count in the environmental psychologist's concern with person/physical setting relationships. They are inherent in the design and use of the built environment in any urban setting, and they not only facilitate the behavior of the person and his interaction with others but they can be the sources of great pleasure or great pain in their own right. In combination they represent critical conditions for more complex responses of the individual to a physical setting insofar as his attempt to satisfy his needs. But the pleasure and pain of the sensory ambience of a setting can be defined in more specific affective terms such as joy, exhilaration, excitement, or on the other side of the continuum sadness, fear, anxiety, and even hate. Places and spaces can arouse such affective responses and indeed they do. Emotional arousal of this kind, of course, is not limited to the sensory ambience of physical settings, that is, the light, sound and temperature. Such conditions do not occur in a vacuum. The other properties of physical settings such as their purposes, related activities, as well as the persons involved, have their own "pleasure and pain" consequences; and these in turn may influence and be influenced by a setting's sensory characteristics. If poor light in a work setting can lead to irritability and therefore interpersonal conflict, the obverse is also true: interpersonal conflicts can have consequences for how people view the adequacy of the sensory ambience of a setting. At a second and more complex level of analysis of person/physical setting relationships, we must view the individual in his or her most human terms, as a thinking-goal directed organism. Inherent in this process is the person's capacity to interpret, understand, plan, or give meaning both to his or her own behavior and the environmental events of which it is a part. At the level of designing an urban community, the fundamental assumption must be made that not only is the community member thinking and goal directed, but he or she has the capacity to use language, judge and choose among alternatives, and anticipate consequences. Outside of some studies of cognitive mapping, we know little of the subjective factors involved in measures of urban distance, complexity, diversity, differentiation and others. What is very clear, however, is that these dimensions of the urban physical world and the day-to-day use of this world require that the person be able to make sense out of it, that is, not just be aware of it but understand it. An important psychological concept for considering the quality of urban life is the individual's need

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to understand what the physical settings of the city are, how they work, and how they can be used. To know or understand allows and tells the person how to act so goals - biological, cultural, or social - can be reached. Physical settings themselves are instrumentalities for need satisfaction and thus they must not only be understood, but the person must have available at least two other abilities. He or she must be competent in using them, such that learning to move through, use, and change physical settings are important considerations in the evolution of the quality of these settings. We would add then to the environmental needs of understanding and competence the no less significant need of environmental control. All three, of course, are interrelated, but each represents an important psychological aspect of the person relating to, using, and deriving benefit from spaces and places. Ostensibly, the capacities and the characteristics of the person play a role in the development of these environmental abilities; but of no lesser importance is the substantive and structural properties of urban settings. How and in what ways they are designed in relation to these abilities are also critical issues in assessing the quality of urban life. In the third and final level of analysis of the individual, we must view him or her as a self-social organism. The individual is both a unique and separate being, but whose very uniqueness and separateness also depends on his place among and relationships with any number of other individuals, small groups, and larger social organizations. The implication from the environmental psychologist's perspective is this - for every role one plays, group one belongs to, value one holds, status one enjoys, and activities one engages in, there are appropriate and relevant spaces and places that also define and give meaning to the self-identity of the person. What follows then is a clear and evident truth. The quality of urban physical settings has clear implications for the socialization and development of the individual as a unique being. Such settings and their physical properties help to define, along with their social properties, the person to himself. Self-identity then is in part a matter of place-identity as well. To the extent that these settings fail, that is, are not appropriate, are "poor in quality," prevent group function and social interaction, to that extent is the development and growth of self-identity threatened. Thus, the home, workplace, school, hospital, and neighborhood, all have direct implications for the nature and well being of the person both generally and at particular stages of the life cycle. The essential question at the level of the complex social needs of a person is whether these physical settings do in fact serve their function of supporting, satisfying, or meeting these needs. Can one sleep, make love, keep warm, achieve status, feel safe, ad infinitum. But in the context of a changing society, moving inexorably toward greater and greater urbanization, there are a number of environmental needs that are of particular importance because they are conceptually related to, and expressive of physical settings and their properties. The individual's need for privacy is one such

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need, and it is by no means unidimensional. It serves many purposes that vary in relation to group and subgroup variations such that questions of the purposes of privacy, how they are achieved, and with what outcomes, require an extensive and long-range program of research. Only a paucity of research on human privacy has been undertaken and reported. We already know, however, that the growing density of urban life, telecommunication advances, and our computerized existence have established human privacy as a major issue in the evaluation of the quality of urban life. Not unrelated, of course, are matters of crowding and territoriality. Every aspect of urban life - the apartment or house, the neighborhood, the bedroom, the classroom, the train seat, the work office, and on and on - relate to the matter of human territoriality: the extent to which the individual does and can define a bounded space as "my space" to himself and to others. Such definition is, of course, fundamental to the individual's need for certain kinds of privacy, the control of his physical setting, and reducing the experience of being crowded. Invasion of one's "territory" wherever it occurs, has implications for interpersonal conflict as well as frustrations of personal, self-related (e.g., need to fantasize), and environmentally related needs (e.g., control space). Of course, other higher order environmental needs enter into a consideration of person/physical setting relationships besides privacy and territoriality, such as aesthetic satisfactions, familiarity, and security. In providing these concepts as markers in considering the quality of urban life, two factors must be stressed that we have already alluded to and briefly discussed before, both of which complicate our blueprint. First is the matter of the life-cycle, the changing nature of the person as a function of age which brings with it biological, psychological, and socioculturai changes that clearly have implications for evaluating the quality of urban physical settings. But a second factor intrudes, of no less significance. Even at the same period in the life cycle, there are group differences (e.g., handicapped, social class, ethnic, educational, and still other sociocultural differences) that raise the fundamental issue of quality of life for whom, what individuals or groups, and in what physical settings. However complicated our psychological blueprint for the analysis of the quality of urban life, environmental psychologists have many places where they can begin to do systematic research. Such research should help us extend our understanding of the quality of urban life in terms of its physical settings. But that understanding also depends on the insights of political scientists, economists, and sociologists. We can only provide a part of the answer and that part as cumulative knowledge may well depend on what these other behavioral scientist environmentalists can tell us. It must be remembered that the quality of urban physical environments is in the end also rooted in other types of environmental factors: freedom from intergroup conflicts, full employment, maintaining democratic freedoms, integrity in public life, and so

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on. Finally, as all of you know, understanding is one thing, application of what we know so that we bring about change is still another. As we all know the matter of social policy leading to change ultimately lies in the hands of the members of the community and their political leaders. The more we know and the better we understand the relationships between urban dwellers and their physical world, the greater likelihood that we can have an influence on that policy.

3. On Cities, Design, and People Gabriele

Scimemi1

1 The Future of Cities and the Role of Design "Design" is a rather broad term. The way I am going to use it here is very much in its original sense (signum, de-signare), as something directly related to the act of drawing, of tracing "signs", on a plan (again, in its original sense of a flat sheet of paper) and to determine by means of such signs (persigna) the future form of things. The variety of things to which the process can apply is also conceivably very broad: it ranges, as the dictum goes, "from the spoon to the city". Generally speaking, it turns out to be easier with a spoon. But it is with the city that we shall concern ourselves in what follows. There have been, time and again, magic moments in the history of urban developments when homofaber, man the craftsman, man the creator, man the architect and the artist, clearly felt that the future of cities could be mastered through design, and that he possessed the tools, the skills, the mandate and the power to do so.

2 Death and Life of the Modern Movement One such moment occurred in the late 1920s at the climax of what became known as Functionalism or Rationalism or the Modern Movement in European architecture, and is sometimes called the International Style in the United States. The moment was indeed prodigious in more than one sense. The roots of the movement drew on a marvellously fertile cultural terrain, enriched by a generation of extraordinary talents (one thinks of the pioneers of modern design, such as Wagner, Berlage, Gamier, Loos, Perret, Behrens) and pulsating with artistic movements (Futurism, Constructivism, Cubism, Plasticism), new ideas and experiments. The receding nightmare of the First World War, and the unlikelihood (or so it seemed) of a second holocaust, fostered a climate of almost limitless confidence in human progress, in technological advancement, in economic growth and universal brotherhood between nations. The times of isolationism and nationalism seemed to be over. 1 Professor Scimemi is at present Deputy Director, Environment Directorate, O.E.C.D. The opinions expressed and the arguments employed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Organisation.

T h e Quality of U r b a n Life © 1986 Walter de Gruyter & Co. • Berlin · N e w York

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Architects and urbanists of the world were called on to unite their efforts in fraternal competition for the design of the Palace of the League of Nations in Geneva: a temple to be erected and dedicated by all the peoples of the world to the ideal of everlasting peace. This, as we now know, was an over-optimistic view. But, notably enough, even the pessimists endorsed the view that - perhaps for the worst rather than the better - the physical structure of the modern city was going to be entirely reshaped by large-scale futuristic design: witness the work of Fritz Lang, originally himself an architect, and his masterpiece, the film "Metropolis", contemporary with the League of Nations Palace competition. Finally, it must be recognised that the charismatic leaders of the Modern Movement conveyed an image of something between a priest and a magician. Whoever had the opportunity of having more than a passing acquaintance with people like Walter Gropius or Le Corbusier would certainly have been impressed by their austerity of appearance, their innate authority, and the sort of subjugation they exerted upon the faithful. This was probably, to some extent, due to the benevolently arrogant selfassurance which anyone must tend to acquire on being told by universally recognised authorities that he had been right all along, but being told so twenty years after the fact. On a less serious note, one may add that a certain aura of witchery also lingered over the panoply of miraculous recipes (the modulor, the golden section) and the repertory of sententious but sometimes cryptic aphorisms ("less is more", "ornament is a crime") and other propitiatory formulas which accompanied their teaching. Amulets and talismans (such as the stylised standing human figure, one arm raised, the hand turned upwards) also played a role in the rituals of Functionalism. Because of the radical novelty of their message, the masters of the Modern Movement had a hard time getting their gospel accepted. When brick, mortar and concrete were not available, they entrusted this message to paper. The Plan Voisin by Le Corbusier, the vast schemes of Hilberseimer, were influential for generations, albeit never built. By general recognition, the greatest monument ever erected to the urban philosophy of Functionalism was the Athens Charter, a bible armed with which the paladins of the Modern Movement bravely set out to conquer the cities of the world. If one has any doubts of the rationalists' conviction that design was in total control, he should read paragraph 92 of the Athens Charter, which opens with "L'architecture préside aux destinées de la cité", and closes with "L'architecture est la clef de tout". Ironically, only a few years later, when the Movement started to lose its intellectual momentum, it finally gained the extraordinary universal recognition it was to retain for decades. There is no doubt that the principles of the Modern Movement have left a lasting impression on the cities in which we live. Memorials of that prime season of urban design, few of them genuine, several distorted by the maladroit misinterpretation of innumerable inept epigones, are to be found in and around most European cities: from the Siedlungen around Berlin, to the British new towns, to the French "grands

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ensembles" and to the myriad stereotyped prefabricated housing projects in eastern European countries. In America the influence of the Modern Movement was felt only after the Second World War, that is after the leaders of the International Style had emigrated there and started working: the effect was also retarded by the persistence of a different indigenous tradition which exhibited a pronounced preference for individual housing units and low-density residential suburbs. But most of the dubious urban renewal operations during the 1950s and 1960s were allegedly carried out in accordance with the ground rules of rationalist urban design. Finally most of the master plans conceived for the existing and new capital cities of the developing countries, some of them still under construction today, clearly reveal the stigma of the modern style of urbanism. Constantinos Doxiadis, the Greek international planner, exerted a decisive influence in this direction. Around the early 1950s, however, there were already signs that the spirit of holy unity enjoyed by the Modern Movement's crusade against the relics of the eclectic and decadent schools of the past would not persist for much longer. Schisms - as is frequently the case - originated within the church itself. The members of "Team X " , for example, all came from the ranks of C.I.A.M. (Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne). Individually, or in small groups, the leading architects of the day, while professing a common point of departure, gradually started to move along diverging routes. The years which followed (Bruno Zevi 1975) were full of stimulating but extremely erratic spurts. As a consequence, it is not easy to generalise about the impact of urban design on cities after the 1950s; although it is still possible to identify the impact of individual designs and individual designers on individual cities. But rather than elaborating on the various architects' diverging stylistic evolutions, it is instructive to analyse a number of major objective factors which, after the Second World War, undermined the predominance of the International Style. These factors had a great deal to do with the persistently uneasy relations of the Modern Movement with cities and city dwellers. The first factor was the emerging concept of interdisciplinarity. The conviction developed around the 1950s, and rapidly acquired credibility, that (in spite of economic prosperity, political democracy and new technologies), most cities suffered from a wide variety of serious problems, and that they needed something more than good urban design if they were to be cured of their ills. Specialists had to be called to their bedsides. Prestigious universities, local administrations, professional magazines, were soon occupied by crews of transport engineers armed with impressive origin-destination diagrams, statisticians equipped with powerful multiple regression methods, sociologists bearing ponderous demoscopie surveys, politologists, and other varieties of analysts and experts. In a number of cases, these professionals banded together into impressive multidisciplinary teams, whose sophisticated techniques commanded a considerable reputation, established the

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primacy of a new style of planning ("comprehensive planning"), and gradually relegated design to a rather ancillary, if not irrelevant, role. Another factor was the emergency of advocacy planning, the advent of public participation and other forms of expression which allowed for the voice of the user to be heard loud and clear above the once dominant solos of the Modern Movement prima donnas. Several such voices were raised in sharp criticism of modern urban design. The protest was sometimes crude and primitive but soon enough found welleducated interpreters such as Paul and Percival Goodman (1960), Jane Jacobs (1961) and Alexander Mitscherlich (1965), among others. The influence of Jane Jacobs was especially relevant because of the enormous popularity of her book "Death and Life of Great American Cities". She had meant this book to be "an attack on current city planning and rebuilding" as well as, and even more so, "an attempt to introduce new principles (. . .) different and even opposite from those now taught". Looking back, it appears that she was considerably more successful in her first, negative purpose than in her second, positive one. Her "new principles" of urban life design were largely based on direct observation of social behaviour and lifestyle in certain North American city districts (Boston's North End, New York's Upper Broadway). This behaviour and lifestyle she judged to be highly commendable; but strangely refused to trace them back, in the first instance, to the residents' national and social backgrounds (especially secondgeneration Italian immigrants), and insisted on ascribing them to specific characteristics of the local layout of streets and buildings. Her detailed recipes, based on such doubtful foundations, did not sound entirely convincing. Besides, several such suggestions were rather simplistic and certainly not too original. Some of them, for example, had been put forward by Cornelius Gurlitt (1904) eighty years ago, in a surprisingly similar literary style. But where she was very convincing was when she stigmatised those current faulty practices of design which made social life almost impossible in many recently built parts of the metropolis. Since these were the very practices that the majority of design professionals, in spite of individual differences in style, had apparently collectively embraced, Jane Jacobs' preaching was immediately taken as a direct attack on design as such. Not only, as she claimed, "the present pseudo-science of city planning, and its companion the art of city design . . . (had) not yet embarked upon the adventure of probing the real world", but it also appeared highly unlikely that any new kind, any new art of design might embark upon such a challenging undertaking with any prospect of success. The next factor in the comparative decline of design was probably the advent of the environmental movement towards the end of the 1960s. Although no sub-system of the biosphere, from the oceanic seabed to the upper layers of the stratosphere is immune from ecological threats, the first alarming signals of environmental degradation came from cities. Emotions were particularly stirred by the disasters caused by air pollution: at Donora (1948: 20 deaths); in London (1952-53 winter: an estimated

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4000 deaths attributable to smog); in New York (400 "excess" deaths in a 15-day smog episode in 1963). Los Angeles became the epitome of the future metropolis, suffocated to death by smog. In a neat, deservedly popular essay, William Baumol (1967) demonstrated how and why the detrimental consequences of pollution tended to increase more than proportionally with urban concentrations and density. As the mechanisms, both physical and economic, at the source of pollution became better understood, several urban specialists, while maintaining the focus of their concern on cities, turned their attention and shifted their professional engagement away from their drawing boards and towards a wide range of environmental policies and measures, such as reducing industrial emissions and discharges, discouraging the use of coal for commercial and domestic heating, treating waste waters and sewage, abating exhaust fumes from automobiles and improving methods of municipal garbage collection and disposal. This was where action was likely to be most effective. Urban design, many of them felt, could at best help, but could never replace specific policies which hit more directly at the origin of problems and were usually faster and easier to implement. I must admit that experience tends to reinforce this feeling. For two years I have been closely following the unstinting efforts to improve air conditions in Athens, one of the most heavily polluted among European cities, using, as a major strategy, the enactment and enforcement of a new master plan. I have recently visited Athens and I was saddened but not too surprised to find that the plan had virtually disappeared, but the smog had not. Perhaps the determining factor in the déstabilisation and decline of the Modern Movement was its ultimate inability to come to terms with history, or, more simply, with the existing city. As Paolo Portoghesi (1984) properly noted, the Modern Movement essentially rejected historical continuity. It conceived urbanism not as an activity assisting the evolution or the transformation of cities, but rather as a totally creative activity which, starting from scratch, would aim at replacing the existing city with an entirely new city. The problems of urban rehabilitation, as we now see them, were totally extraneous to architects of the Modern Movements. Le Corbusier's plans for Paris implied the total demolition of the Marais. To be sure, a few individual monuments of extraordinary significance were identified and would have been preserved. The Athens Charter recommended, indeed, that historic monuments be respected. But the very fact that each monument was to be singled out as an exception, and honoured as such, put each of these buildings on a sort of pedestal, like a precious object in a museum, thus making sure that it remained forever detached from the daily flow of life and the ordinary experience of the people. However, especially since the end of the Second World War and in part because of the vast rehabilitation work necessitated by wartime destruction, the problem of the existing city, of the historic centre, of old urban districts, of traditional quarters

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assumed entirely different proportions. Theories which seemed appropriate when applied to exceptional cases collapsed under the weight of the massive rebuilding task ahead. The trend turned away from urban renewal (which eventually became a pejorative phrase) and towards urban conservation and rehabilitation. Episodes such as the reconstruction of Warsaw, an entirely new city reconstructed as an exact replica of the old one, were a shock for what had become, by that time, the "modern" establishment. The extent of the turn-around is perhaps epitomised by the case of Bologna where several years later the comprehensive rehabilitation programme went so far as to replace certain housing projects dating from the 1930s with new constructions deliberately based on mediaeval typologies which had never existed on the site. This may indeed be an extreme. By that time, however, increasing evidence from practice all over Europe, as well as the United States, had demonstrated that old building types could be perfectly well adapted to new functions, that disused or abandoned factories could easily host upper-class apartments or chic shopping centres as in the very successful Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, and ancient railroad stations such as La Gare d'Orsay could become perfectly effective museums. This inevitably undermined the basic tenets of Functionalism and in the long run seriously weakened its ideological strength if not its poetic appeal.

3 "Megastructura Labilis" The modern movement has been pronounced dead on several occasions. It was declared dead by Philip Johnson as early as 1959 at an official meeting of the American Institute of Architects. More than ten years later, Charles Jencks (1980) issued the famous statement "Modern architecture died in Saint Louis, Missouri on July 15 1972 at 3.30 p.m. (or thereabouts)": a sentence which became the title of a book by Peter Blake. It was declared dead again - albeit with a question mark - as late as 1981, by Ada Louis Huxtable. Anyone who manages to outlive such an inauspicious series of obituaries over such a considerable time period must possess a healthy constitution indeed. The fact is especially remarkable considering that during the same period of time the principal factors which had turned the fortunes of urban design had surely not receded: their importance had, if anything, increased. Even more extraordinary is the fact that in spite of these obstacles a new school of urban design emerged during this period, rapidly attracted world-wide attention, reached a sufficient degree of identity, was christened with the rather imposing name, "Megastructuralism", became a recognised international movement and bequeathed a number of monuments to its short but feverish existence. For Megastructures, the magic movement exploded around 1964. This has been

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authoritatively established by Reyner Banham (1976), in his fundamental study of the movement. Megastructures can be defined - again based upon Banham's work as colossal constructions consisting of huge, modular (permanent but extensible) structural frameworks into which smaller prefabricated buldings of various kinds, rooms, capsules, passages, balconies, entire dwellings, can be permanently or temporarily built in, plugged in, or clipped on, so that the entire panoply of urban functions can ultimately be accommodated within a single structure. Reyner Banham identified, to begin with, anticipators such as Antonio Sant'Elia (1914) and even Gropius and Le Corbusier (1935). Sant'Elia's manifesto sounds remarkable prophetic when one considers it was written before 1920: 'We must invent and rebuild ex novo our modern city like an immense and tumultuous building site, active, mobile and everywhere dynamic, and the modern building like a gigantic machine . . . lifts must swarm up the façades like serpents of glass and iron . . . [the street must] plunge storeys deep into the earth, collecting the traffic of the metropolis and connected for necessary transfers to metal catwalks and high-speed conveyor belts". In the 1960s the idea was resuscitated, and proliferated at incredible speed all over the world. Among the examples of megastructures, either built or only designed, that Banham diligently collected, one finds the Boston Harbour Development Project and the Tokyo Bay Project by K. Tange (1960); the Space City by A. Isozaki; Cumbernauld Town Centre by L. H. Wilson and G. Copcutt (1960); the Suspended City by Frei Otto; various instances of Yona Friedman's Urbanisme spatial - Paris, New York, Algiers, the English Channel Bridge (1964); the Helicoid Projects by Kisho Kurokawa (1961); Ocean City by Kyonoru Kikutake; the project for Hook New Town in the United Kingdom by the London County Architects (1961); various schemes by the Archigram Group (City Interchange, Walking City, Plug-in City); various proposals for the Italian Quartieri Direzionali, e.g. for Turin, by Quaroni and by Tafuri and the A. U.A. Group, as well as for the Asse Attrezzato in Rome; the Arcologies by Paolo Soleri (1964); the Gratz-Radnitz Project by Domenic and Huth (1966-1969); some Urban Projects by the Soviet NER Group (1967); the study for the Zoo District "Berlin 1995" by O. M. Ungers at Technical University Berlin (1968); the Comprehensive City by Mike Mitchell and D. Boutwell (1969); and the Lower Manhattan Expressway Project by P. Rudolph (1970). How did Megastructuralism manage to cope with the various difficulties with which the Modern Movement was increasingly confronted, and which ultimately threatened to force Functionalism to face a number of critical contradictions and unresolved issues? The rather shrewd strategy of the megastructuralists was that of keeping the game in their own field for as long as possible; problems could not be ignored, but they could be retained in the realm of architecture and dealt with in terms of design, thus avoiding involvement in rational arguments. Their methodological approach was, in a sense, the inverse of metaphysics. Ancient metaphysics tended to transcend the physical world in order to deal with problems in purely

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logical terms. T h e megastructuralist movement sought to transcend rationality in order to attack problems in essentially physical terms: that is to say, in terms which architecture and architects inherently control. In particular, the inescapable incompatibility between the old and the new city was elegantly side-stepped by making sure that the two were incommensurable in their scale, incomparable in their f o r m , geometry and texture, and as separated as possible in space. T h e latter condition was achieved by literally raising the megastructure clear of the ground and well above the level of the existing city on a sort of artificial platform, which was the case for Y o n a Friedman's projects, most of the J a p a n e s e " M e t a b o l i s t s " , B a k e m a ' s entry for the T e l A v i v - Y a f o competition and the works of Archigram. O r else the same effect was obtained by moving it into the "negative s p a c e " or the outer vacuum of the existing city, which was the case for the T o k y o B a y P r o j e c t and the various O c e a n Cities, such as those of Kyonoru K i k u t a k e or Paul Maymont. This strategy, of providing symbolic, allegorical, rather than real solutions applied to a whole range of problems. Thus the tremendous technological difficulties associated with such oversized constructions were just alluded to (rather than concretely dealt with) through the elaborate graphic emphasis given to beams and buttresses, pipes and joints in the blueprints. A s for sociological issues, " T h e f a m i l y " , K i k o t a k e explains, "will welcome with j o y not only the new dwelling but also its elevation towards the sky which symbolises their taking their place as members of urban s o c i e t y " . This poetic metaphor supposedly should placate the existential anguish of the people of the metropolis, forever captives of a relentless struggle amongst themselves for economic success and social advancement. M o r e generally, as Mitchell and Boutwell wrote, the megastructural option seemed to offer a way of dominating " t h e huge, uncontrolled and sprawling chaos that we now call C i t y " which " i s choking our civilization". It s e e m e d , as R o b i n Middleton ( 1 9 6 8 ) observed, " t h a t wonderous new megacities would be created high above the old towns, avoiding all the complexities of usage, land-ownership and b u r e a u c r a c y " , and that " v e s t e d interests could be elegantly by-passed". It does not take much to discern behind megastructural imageries the professional architect's dream to dominate, somewhat magically, through a grand single gesture, the overweeningly intricate maze of problems which besets the modern city, and thus to repossess in one single thrust, as powerful as a cavalry charge, the territory of urbanism which the planners had invaded. This is what Cesare Pelli meant when he declared that " t h e only reason for megastuctures is the ambition of architects". Such a dream is nothing new, of course; it is a recurrent dream, as old as architecture. It was just embarrassing in the 1960s to admit openly what the A t h e n s Charter had unabashedly spelled out in the 1930s. This was enough, for certain commentators, to infer that Megastructuralism should b e recognised as a late descendant of the Modern Movement's lineage. Curiously

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enough, megastructuralists - those few who had a chance to build as well as those who had to be content with their drawings - theorised the movement as a break from tradition. What is more, quite a few enthusiastic adepts - including important groups of post-1968 radical students - saw themselves as Utopians and revolutionaries, or at least social reformers, taking to their hearts the deep, genuine aspirations of the people. In retrospect, it is hard to see how this could be reconciled with the monstrous proportions, overcomplex functional structure and somewhat frightening appearance of the monuments they intended to build. One could perhaps argue that a revolution might be necessary in order for such megastructures to be feasible. But it is hard to see the converse, that is to say how megastructures would have served the cause of revolution. And in fact "second generation" revolutionaries at some point discovered and denounced the inconsistency and disavowed the movement. This is not, however, what eventually brought about the decline and fall of megastructures. If megastructures ceased to appeal to revolutionaries and the avantgarde, ironically they could start counting on support from the establishment. A brilliant architectural proposition, while patently unfit to break the ground for the advancement of revolution, could elegantly clear away legal barriers and administrative obstacles to profitable capital investment in real estate. Its unusual appearance and magnitude could in themselves provide the necessary business promotion. Unfortunately for megastructures, precisely at that delicate juncture something happened along their way to realisation. First, economic recession. And secondly, urban decline. The precise nature of the linkages between these two trends, which manifested themselves in the early 1970s, is still a matter of debate in scholarly circles. Whatever view one may wish to hold, there is little doubt that times of economic stringency unprecedented over the past half-century, with tight credit and fiscal squeeze, and times when urban populations are shrinking at an alarming pace, when land and buildings are abandoned in inner city areas, when jobs are moving away from central areas, are hardly the most propitious times to embark on projects demanding astronomic investments and long years of financial exposure and requiring a virtually inexhaustible market for built-up space to be profitable. Nevertheless, some megastructures or pseudo-megastructures got built (or at least got in train), before the wind changed, in various countries, such as Cumbernauld New Town Centre (a reduced version of the original G. Coppcutt's design) in the United Kingdom, Montreal's Habitat, by Safdie (1967), in Canada, and Yamanishi Communication Centre (1955) in Japan, the Centre Pompidou by Piano, Rogers and Franchini in France, the Berlin International Congress Centre in Germany, and several others. To be sure, these buildings, although rich in imagination and far from devoid of architectural interest, are no more than comparatively "small" or incomplete projects, and are to some extent spurious or partial specimens insofar as the range of functions they happen to host is relatively modest. The contrast between heroic

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expectations and limited realities may explain the frustrated gloom of Banham's concluding remarks (1976), looking back on the movement as a "whitening skeleton on the dark horizon of our recent architectural past".

4 Post-Modern and Beyond After the rather discreet withdrawal of megastructuralism, have all architects of the world united once again, one may ask, under some other banner? The answer seems clear: not all have, but many have, and the new banner is that of Post-modernism. A curious banner indeed: a label which certain among the movement's very pioneers and leading figures reject; a denomination bearing a perfectly precise definition of what the current is noi - modernism - but saying nothing about what it is instead. So far, with the number of new constructions inspired by the Post-modern movement growing every day and multiplying in city after city, country after country, its impact on urban design, as distinct from its influence on architecture, is still difficult to assess. Admittedly a great deal of the doctrine of Post-modernism has been learnt from cities, notably from Las Vegas (Venturi and Scott-Brown 1972). Various leading figures attached to the movement have developed individual approaches to the city, such as Krier in his projects for Luxembourg or Rossi in his books. Others have been quite content to accommodate their conceptions to whatever urban scheme was available, including the most conventional 19th century gridiron subdivisions. Still others simply redeployed, as it were, clichés which Sitte, La vedan, and others had used in their books. But there is no unifying thread in sight. It is unlikely that a new Athens Charter will ever be put together by the Post-modern movement. Postmodernism cannot claim to have fostered a consensus among its adherents on how to deal with the city as a whole. On the other hand a distinct thread unites post-modernists in their approach to the reconciliation of ancient architectures and modern cities. Once again the potential conflict has been averted and a truce has been declared on the specific territory of architecture. Forms, elements of style and symbols are the instruments of the postmodern conviviality of past and present. According to modern ethnology, ritual anthropophagy of war prisoners is known to be perpetrated by certain tribes in the hope of exorcising their enemies and appropriating their martial virtues. Likewise, Post-modernism cannibalises the past, regurgitates its disembodied limbs, and, through the arbitrary recombination of its elements, gives birth to a most intriguing breed of contrivances within which antiquity and futurism appear oddly and inextricably interwoven. By way of this sort of ritual, "the conflict between ancient and modern" - writes

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Ruggero Guarini (1984) - "tends to vanish in the movement which, by virtue of its own momentum, manages to eliminate the very tension which ought to sustain it. As a result, the past is turned into a repository of trouvailles: residuals, fragments variously available for all kinds of games, quotations, hybridisation and assemblages; games in which so much of contemporary art consists." Hence the extraordinary proliferation of arches, lintels, pediments, friezes and mouldings, interspersed with colossal capitals, some of them cantilevered in mid-air; columns, some of them hollow and sectioned along their length; tabernacles, porticos, some of them painted in improbable shades of pink, pastel green or indigo; and many more odds and ends taken - as it were - from some architectural pawnbroker's shop. And between them, sure enough, windows to look out and doors to get in. Form, after all, should make some concessions to function. The golden centuries of Italian architecture have become the privileged source of inspiration for a good deal of American post-modern urban design. A conspicuous case is the Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans. But one discovers reminiscences of the layout of Rome's Capitol as far away as Tsukuba, close to the grounds of the 1985 Japanese International Exhibition. Europeans have been more eclectic in their sources, which span many centuries, and have exhumed even Fascist and Stalinist urban design prototypes without apparent embarrassment. There is perhaps no reason to be upset about such borrowing from the past. Precedents abound in architecture. Doric columns from the Renaissance were borrowed by the nineteenth century eclecticism, by the Renaissance from Rome, by Rome from Greece. Even the Parthenon's pillars are monumental copies of ancient wooden shafts. But the fact is that the Modern Movement had cast such practices into the most severe ostracism. For decades, the naive classical grotesque statuary, in concrete and plaster, which was the delight of the petit-bourgeois suburban cottage owner, had been condemned as the quintessence of kitsch and bad taste. On the urban scale, the empty magniloquence of Hitlerian and Mussolinian monumentalism was exposed to public scorn. The palm of ridicule was assigned to the stations of Moscow's underground railway, built in 1936 in a bizarre assortment of pseudoclassical styles. It may seem odd at first sight, but only at first sight, that during the same period in parallel domains of contemporary music, literature and the figurative arts, explicit classical connexions should be accepted without much scandal. There is an important difference, however, and the difference is relevant to the subject of cities. It is the fundamental distinction which exists between awareness and unawareness. Devotees of contemporary music attending a concert would never confuse Prokofiev's Classical Symphony with Mozart, nor Milhaud's Suite Provençale with Rameau. Experienced art lovers visiting a modern gallery will not hesitate to attribute the various à la manière de Titian, Rubens, Fragonard, and Canaletto to the versatile brush of De Chirico. Nowadays such "exercices de style" are increasingly

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in vogue. Readers of Umbert E c o ' s " T h e Name of the R o s e " are likely to be sophisticated enough to realise that the manuscript was written not in Melk in the fourteenth century but in Milan in the twentieth century. In all these situations, what the cognoscenti would deliberately seek and particularly savour would be the subtle irony of the quotations, the enticing spell of evocation and the exquisite thrill of complicity with the masters. When they go to that concert, visit that exhibition, buy that book, they do it deliberately. But what about citizens in the city, what about the proverbial " m a n in the s t r e e t " , what about everyday experience and everybody's environment? Will everyone be alert and willing to play the game? Is there not a considerable risk that the result will be neither erudite enjoyment, nor "conflict and contradiction", which admittedly are inherent qualities of the city, but rather ambiguity and confusion? Charles Jencks ( 1 9 8 0 ) , an unquestionable authority on post-modernism, does nothing but reinforce this conjecture when he writes about " a building which communicates at at least two levels simultaneously: to other architects and an engagé minority concerned with specifically architectural meanings, and to the broader public, or to local residents, whose problems are those of comfort, traditional construction, lifestyle. " A s a consequence" - Jencks continues - "post-modern architecture appears to be a hybrid. If architects are in a position to read the implicit metaphors, ( . . . ) the public can react to the explicit ones. Everyone, no doubt, will react to some degree to both signs, as is the case for a post-modern building, but with different intensities and abilities to understand: this discontinuity between cultural groups is what creates the theoretical basis and the 'double code' of post-modernism". 2 One cannot help perceiving some disturbing deja-vu's in this discourse. What about this concept of two distinct levels of understanding? Would it be going too far to recall the proverbial discrimination between the role of the knowledgeable few and that of the populace in Lenin's theory of revolution? Or, this being, after all, 1984, does the "double c o d e " perhaps evoke Orwellian "double-think"? T h e associations are disquieting. I suppose that such insinuations would be indignantly refuted by post-modern designers, at least by some of them. " T h e exercise showed u s " , writes Bofill undoubtedly one of the most gifted virtuosi of post-modern design - "that it was possible to build symbols (theatres, temples, triumphal arches, e t c . ) which in the future could be transformed into habitable communal spaces ( . . . ) that it was important to use the vocabulary and elements of architecture of the past and to bring these within the reach of the whole society. . . " . The intentions sound honourable, but do things work this way? Critics such as William Curtiss ( 1 9 8 4 ) , who visited Bofill's projects such as the Palacio de Abraxas at Marne la Vallée near Paris, suggests that " t h e place conveys the impression of a smart marketing trick t o lure prospective inhabitants away from the true city into a suburban commuter silo".

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P e r h a p s this is w h a t p e o p l e are asking f o r . T h a t was, r e p o r t e d l y , t h e justification for M o s c o w ' s u n d e r g r o u n d stations. A f t e r all, t h e archaeological souvenir shops on t h e steps to the A c r o p o l i s o r in the shadow of t h e C o l o s s e u m , with their plastic minim o n u m e n t a l m e r c h a n d i s e , also bring " t h e vocabulary a n d t h e e l e m e n t s of architect u r e of t h e past within t h e reach of the w h o l e society". A n d business s e e m s to b e good. T h e r e s e e m s t o b e such a t r e m e n d o u s yearning for things p a s t , a nostalgic n e e d for symbols in c o n t e m p o r a r y society. A n d p e o p l e s e e m perfectly h a p p y with b l a t a n t c o u n t e r f e i t s . Witness, for e x a m p l e t h e fascination of t h e hippy a n d p u n k g e n e r a t i o n s f o r " o l d " u n i f o r m s f r e s h f r o m g a r m e n t factories. Witness t h e current b o o m in vintage cars such as t h o s e now p r o d u c e d by the S o u t h K o r e a n firm " P a n t h e r C a r s " , a n d Bugatti replicas currently available in kit f o r m in t h e U n i t e d K i n g d o m . W i t n e s s t h e popularity of (Jim) A b r a h a m s and t h e (David a n d J e r r y ) Z u c k e r b r o t h e r s ' recent " r e m a k e s " of films that n o b o d y ever m a d e in t h e 1940s. In this vein city-dwellers will p e r h a p s w e l c o m e p o s t - m o d e r n i s m as a vehicle f o r escaping f r o m reality. By extending its stylistic r e p e r t o r y still f u r t h e r , as s o m e postm o d e r n architects in fact d o , to include a few traditional, regional, or n a t i o n a l f e a t u r e s f r o m various folklores, p o s t - m o d e r n i s m could also cater for t h e r e t u r n - t o the-village s y n d r o m e or f o r the exotic desires which also lay h i d d e n u n d e r a few psychological layers of t h e a p p a r e n t l y blasé and d i s e n c h a n t e d c o n t e m p o r a r y u r b a n society. O r p e r h a p s n o t . P e r h a p s p e o p l e will start reacting against what m a y look suspiciously like a practical j o k e at their expense. T h e r e may already be signs of incipient n e r v o u s n e s s h e r e and t h e r e . O n e d o e s not n e e d to look for t h e m in specialised magazines: " L e t t e r s to t h e E d i t o r " in daily p a p e r s provide b e t t e r sources. H e r e is an interesting e x a m p l e received by the Financial Times (26th O c t o b e r 1984) a f t e r it h a d published an "artist's i m p r e s s i o n " of a p r o j e c t for a s u p e r s t o r e at H a r r o g a t e : "Sir, The pendulum of fashion swings in architecture as in everything else but it seems a pity to me that it is swinging so far in the direction of a so-called 'vernacular' as a reaction against the concrete brutalities of the 1960s. The massive, neo-industrial structures which have characterised many hypermarkets may nowadays be unacceptable but can architect and client show no more confidence in their own age than to build a superstore that apparently looks like a row of 1930 semis [i.e. semi-detached houses]? My only consolation is the thought that both the superstore and the Hayward Gallery (to mention one of the most unpopular brutalist blots on the London townscape) will probably, at different times in the future if they survive long enough, delight the Betjemans of posterity." (Letter by Michael Goldman, Blackheath). T h e issue, as e v e r y o n e can see, is far f r o m settled.

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5 What Next? In 1984 an important international meeting, attended by thousands of participants from large cities all over the world, was held in Paris on the future of the metropolis: "Metropolis '84". Of the more than 40 titles included in the list of presentations, not one contained the word "Design" or the word "Architecture". Posters announcing the event were pasted all over Paris and on the conference room walls. But there were no city plans on exhibit, no drawings, no pictures, no models to be seen. Architects, a notoriously easy-to-spot species, were conspicuously absent. Could one infer that design has disappeared for ever from the catalogue of urban concerns? I believe that this would be too hasty a deduction and that there is enough evidence to support a different, better articulated set of conclusions. What seems to be gone - at least for the foreseeable future and at least in the socalled modern countries - is the prospect for grandiose urban schemes - whether megastructural in style or not - to create entirely new cities, superimposing over the existing city a new order, a new global image, a new skyline. Perhaps this is no bad thing. Throughout history grand schemes have rarely materialised without the backing of an authoritarian client. Le Corbusier made no bones about it. When he published "La Ville Radieuse" in 1935, he dedicated it "à l'Autorité". He spoke loud and clear; and he would be especially irritated if he could hear today, the ludicrous, painfully contorted efforts of certain of his apologètes to explain that what he had actually meant was "to Democracy". Another easy prediction is that, in the near future, and in this part of the world, the share of rehabilitation, re-use, maintenance, adaptation and reconstruction will be larger than that of entirely new construction. This also sounds quite reasonable in view of the current balance between needs and means. This is no less an economic than a cultural imperative. "Planning for the maintenance of assets into the future" noted Harvey Perloff - "may not seem like the most exciting activity. Perhaps planning for the future should be focussed on the great new things that will or might happen. However, if the desired changes are to be implemented within the limits of resources likely to be available in the latter part of the twentieth century, such changes must be introduced by carefully timing the maintenance and renewal of existing assets." There should be no misunderstanding here: design, of course, plays a paramount role in the delicate art and science of architectural restoration; but clearly not in the sense relevant to our present analysis. At the same time, the pattern of new construction in cities - and there will be a considerable amount of new construction, barring a recurrence of the economic crisis - w i l l probably tend to be sporadic and episodic, rather than compact, on the scale of a few blocks or a single building rather than vast estates. This being the case, the impact of design on cities will depend less on the size of individual projects and more

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on the possible emergence of an identifiable architectural style, on the degree of generalisation and pervasiveness such a style will reach, on the extent to which this same style will at the same time inspire most of the expression of design in the city, and on the life-span of such a style. Megastructuralism, for example, did not lack in boldness, imagination, or scope. Yet its life was too ephemeral to leave more than a marginal imprint. If, as another concrete example, Post-modernism proves to be more than a passing fad, it may conceivably conquer the city gradually and unobtrusively, block by block, façade by façade, detail by detail, until the whole urban fabric is permeated. Post-modernists are in a perfect position to follow that route, inasmuch as their stance about what needs to be done seems to be the exact opposite of what the megastructuralists thought. The latter, especially the "Metabolists", "were prepared to let small matters look after themselves on a vernacular basis while a large megaform of some sort held the ensemble together and gave professional permanency where it was socially needed" (Banham 1976). Post-modernists, in contrast, tend to argue that "small matters" are the only ones which can and should be controlled, whereas the "ensemble" is better left to take care of itself. Whether Post-modernism - or for that matter any other style - will eventually come to predominate or not, is going to depend on the reaction of the public in an increasingly substantive way. Long gone are the days when Ruskin (1854, 1859) could assert that "what is wrong with people is their temper, not their taste; their patient and trustful temper, which lives in houses taken for granted and subscribes to public buildings from which it derives no enjoyment". That temper has been gradually but steadily rising over the last few decades. In the 1930s, the Berlin Siedlungen were received with considerable reluctance by their prospective working class occupiers. L'Unité d'Habitation at Marseilles met with a similarly lukewarm welcome. Montreal's habitat did not get half as enthusiastic an accolade as its proponents expected on the basis of their own notion of a typical household's aspirations. In the 1970s, Thamesmead was a bigger headache for the Greater London Council than Sarcelles had been for their French counterparts in the 1960s: they had quite a hard time persuading people to go and live there. Recently public opinion has taken an increasingly aggressive stance, and on occasions has forced responsible authorities to take extreme steps. In 1978 the infamous blocks of the Pruitt Igoe housing project in Saint Louis - as had the walls of Jericho at the sound of Joshua's trumpets - collapsed at the clamour of public outrage, admittedly with the help of a few sticks of dynamite. The same fate befell the Cité Olivier de Serre at Villeurbanne: the blocks were demolished in 1978. And it may soon be the turn of the towers of Ronan Point in East London. More importantly, the recent downturn in urbanisation trends clearly shows that people are quite capable of abandoning places they dislike, and this could mean deserting entire city centres or large inner city districts, leaving behind vast derelict

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tracts open to decay, vandalism, fire and crime. If current urban decline is a problem, which it certainly is, the visual environment may not be the paramount cause, but it is certainly a significant contributory factor. Urban design may well have a strategic role to play in the complex strategy for stemming the population outflow from cities, as well as the outflow of economic activities, and attracting back to cities not just the desperate, who cannot be too finicky about what kind of roof they get and where, but the appropriate assortment of people and functions. And this is a prerequisite for economic prosperity and social progress in cities, without which there will be neither progress nor prosperity in nations. "Urbanism" - according to the contemporary French essayist Alain de Benoist (1979) - "has a primordial relationship with the specific adaptation of forms to the souls of people. Contemporary cities are not hideous because they are modern, or because most of what is to be seen there is concrete. They are detestable because they breed alienation and depersonalisation. Urbanism only succeeds when it inscribes its modernity within the framework of that intuitive conception of forms, that sense of space, that moulding of volumes which is peculiar to a given population group. In other words, when there is spiritual correspondence between architectural forms and the cultural psychology of the people." The urbanism of the past few decades has not been too fortunate in that respect. More recent contributions have been, at best, fragmentary. Megastructures and Post-modernism have had the curiously complementary effect of enriching cityscapes with, on one hand, fragments of a future which will never materialise and, on the other hand, fragments of a past which never existed. What a perfect correspondence, an optimist might say, with the current fragmentation of urban society in a fragmented world. Well, this is not the sort of optimism I would care to subscribe to. I would hold a very different view of "the spiritual correspondence between architectural forms and the cultural psychology of the people". I would like to look to a different set of conditions to lead to the reconciliation of contemporary city-dwellers with themselves, with each other and with the metropolis. I am ready to concede that this ideal still seems to be some considerable distance away, and to acknowledge that the road ahead is beset with formidable problems; sociological, cultural, political, technological, economic, environmental, administrative and institutional. Design by itself will not magically solve these problems. A pencil is not a magic wand. But design is important. Were designers progressively to withdraw from the challenge of the urban scale and retreat into the episodic, the particular, the detail; were people to become increasingly alienated from the place where they live and disinterested in whatever happens to their surroundings; were responsible authorities to lose sight of the role of architecture as a constituent element of a comprehensive urban strategy then what is already an extremely difficult undertaking may become simply impossible.

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References Banham, R. (1976). Megastructure. London: Thames and Hudson. Baumöl, W. (1976). Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth. The American Economic Review, 57. Bofill, R. (1978). L'architecture d'un homme. Entretiens avec Francois Hébert - Stevens. Paris: Arthaud. Curtiss, W. (1984). Uses and abuses of History. The Architectural Review, 46 (1050). De Benoist, Α., quoted by Giraud, H. C. (1976). Quel Cadre de Vie? Le Figaro Magazine (10812), 9. Juin. Goodman, Percival and Paul Goodman (1960). Communitas. Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life. New York: Random House, Vintage Books. Gropius, W. (1955). The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. London: Faber and Faber. Guarini, R. (1983/1984). Editoriale. Eupalino (I). Gurlitt, C. (1904). Über Baukunst. Berlin: Julius Bard. Hilberseimer, L. (1944). The New City: Principles of Planning. Chicago: P. Theobald & Co. Huxtable, A. L. (1981). IsModern Architecture Dead? The New York Review of Books, July. Jacobs, J. (1961). Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books. Jencks, C. (1980). Un Classicisme Post-Moderne. Paris: Academy. Lavedan, P. (1952). Histoire de l'Urbanisme. Paris: Laurens. Le Corbusier (1935). La Ville Radieuse. Paris: Architecture d'aujourd'hui. Middleton, R. (1968). Editorial. Architectural Design, December. Mitscherlich, A. (1965). Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte. Anstiftung zum Unfrieden. Frankfurt (Main): Suhrkamp. Perloff, H. S. (1980). Planning the Post-Industrial City. Washington and Chicago: Planners Press. Portoghesi, P. (1984). Dopo l'idea della città moderna. Recuperare (12). Rossi, A. (1966). L'architettura della città. Padova: Marsilio. Ruskin, J. (1854). Lectures on Architecture and Painting. London: Smith, Elder & Co. (1859). The Two Paths. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Sant'Elia, A. (1914). Messaggio sull'architettura, in Nuove Tendenze. Milano: Direzione del Movimento Futurista. Sitte, C. (1889). Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen. Wien: Graeser (reprint 1965, Wien: Pracher). Venturi, R. and D. Scott-Brown (1972). Learning from Las Vegas. London and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Zevi, B. (1975). Storia dell'architettura moderna. Quinta edizione. Torino: Einaudi.

Part Β: Social Networks Introduction Rainer

Mackensen

1. The quality of urban life depends heavily on the quality of social relations in neighbourhoods. Not that both are identical: there is a quality of the physical environment that may be discussed in its own right. But for the people living in the city, their evaluation of urban life seems to be affected more by their social relations than by the physical environment. Social relations are not what all people live in and for. A good part of their activities are concentrated on making a living. Material conditions may be the strongest single incentive controlling their behaviour. And physical environment provides some of the material conditions of life: housing, work places, shopping areas, public institutions, recreational facilities, traffic systems, and the like. Accessibility of places for activities is an important aspect of the urban scenery. Every day the movement between these places forms an activity pattern (Friedrichs 1977) demonstrating much of the physical conditions established for living in a city by urban physical structure and planning. Still more important for shaping a life style may be the conditions of labor and of earning a living. But we have learned that the perception of material conditions varies considerably with social situations. Satisfaction with housing conditions and urban settings very much depends upon the quality of social relations - at home, at work, in official contacts, in recreational activities. The physical environment, as a part of the material setting people live in, is both a condition and a consequence of the pattern of social relations in an area. As a condition it allows for social contacts, or makes them difficult, even impossible. As a consequence it is being shaped, partly, by patterns of social relations, their content, intensity, and frequency. The physical environment reflects its usage by people - their activities, their wellbeing or their ill-feelings. And the changes it undergoes are to a certain extent reflections of this use. Activities, including the use of the physical urban environment, are shaped by material conditions, but not solely so. They depend more on the social system of a city, and on social relations determined by this system. Within a social system, there

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is room for ways of interaction not entirely determined by it. Indeed, a social system rests to a large extent on informal interaction. 2. It has been convincingly demonstrated twenty years ago that perception of the urban environment depends to a large degree on the density of social relations in an urban area (Treinen 1965). They are responsible for a possible identification with the physical environment, and a prerequisite for collective action in the neighbourhood and for its development. Planning intends to preserve and even to support social relations in housing areas. In many studies dealing with the social structure and quality of neighbourhoods these have been dealt with in the aggregate (Hamm 1973). Results speak of social characteristics of neighbourhoods as a consequence. Many authors, including planners, tend to speak of the neighbourhood as a social and physical unit. And indeed, there are some aspects of an urban housing quarter which can be characterized by common features - such as density, quality of housing, provision of social amenities, and also general measures of social structure. It is not these characteristics alone, though, that support the social quality of a neighbourhood. They are a framework for possible, and if favourable and homogeneous enough, probable social relations. These do not go with them of necessity. During the development over the last decades, mobility has increased, and so has social segregation in the city. Social mobility also means the frequency of changing a flat, and therefore the necessity to reestablish social relations in the neighbourhood. It means, additionally, scattering of places of activity over a wider area in the city. Both are phenomena not entirely independent from housing policy, traffic development, and city planning. To a certain extent, the urban planner fights himself: he wants to strengthen the social bonds in the neighbourhood, and he wants to organize the distribution of locations in the city for maximum overall accessibility and efficiency. As a consequence we observe that the density of social interaction in the neighbourhood tends to decrease. But we have not begun to learn enough about what this means for the people concerned. Is it really the density of interaction in the neighbourhood that counts for them? They may be satisfied with a rather superficial form of interaction in the neighbourhood, and depend more on individual relations for support and comfort. Their individual social networks may transgress the area of the neighbourhood and develop in different directions for people with different social characteristics. They may live more with social relations which they have established in earlier periods or other spheres of their lives - in former living quarters, from school experience, from work places, from larger kinship systems. We therefore have to look more closely into what social relations mean to people. Our idea of a neighbourhood, and of the physical environment as a shell for its social quality, may change drastically through more concrete descriptions of what social relations mean nowadays in an urban setting.

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In doing so we may well remember research from earlier investigations. Pfeil (1959) has studied the spatial configurations of social relationships in the city, and demonstrated their diverging characteristics. She like Bott (1971) has shown that actual relations and neighbourhood contacts do not overlap. The following contributions deal with questions of how to establish a better knowledge of social interaction in neighbourhoods. For a closer look into the system of relationships they adapt the concept of social network. Network is not an aggregate concept. It looks into the factual relations of people. The system of relations the individuals have, the families and households established, is the basis of the total social relationship within the community, and also in the neighbourhood. We can achieve a detailed understanding of the social meaning of a neighbourhood only if we know about the density and content of social networks in housing areas (Mackensen 1983, 1985). 3. Essential for this view is the establishment of knowledge on the meaning and function of social networks for people. It is not just pleasant to have more and better informal social relations; people depend on their existence and quality. They are also necessary to cope with individual problems, with difficult situations, and with crises in the life cycle. It has been possible to show that people tend to get less sick, and if so, to recover earlier if imbedded in a social network of high intensity. Social networks are therefore an essential aspect of the quality of life. Β adura presents a conceptual framework adequate to demonstrate the role of network relations in coping with the everyday life problems of individuals. This is very different from that which we know about the quality of social relations in an urban neighbourhood in general. These relations do include, to be sure, social networks, but we do not know to what extent. Apart from such networks, social relations in neighbourhoods have much more of a defensive character, as in contrast to the supportive character of networks. The main objective of social relations in neighbourhoods is to get along with each other, not to interfere too much in the activities important for individuals and households. However, if we know about the essential functions of social networks, we still do not know about their frequency, their density, and their extension in the areas of a city. These are topics not yet studied in enough detail. We do know, from many studies on social networks, about several of their properties, but we know little about how they are distributed in settlements, to what extent they contribute to the quality of urban neighbourhoods, and how they are influenced by features of the physical environment, or changes in it. 4. To bridge these questions and the state of research on social networks, Sodeur has established a couple of hypotheses for future research. He has screened the literature for findings as to how physical environment features may influence the frequency, intensity and form of social networks, and for procedures for investigating social networks in an urban environment.

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His comments are illustrative and helpful. He is eager to show that research may lead to irrelevant or misleading results if not executed properly. The concept of social network is a rare one in the sense that it allows us to demonstrate the functioning of social relations. It overrules those concepts, prominent in social surveys, which draw conclusions only from the characteristics and opinions of individuals. One of the consequences of such research strategies is our insufficient understanding of the social meaning of neighbourhoods, permitting only statements on the aggregate as a whole, and not on its effective social structure. The concept of social network, in turn imposes higher standards on sampling the units of inquiry and on gathering information from respondents, if it is going to be possible to achieve statements on the structural aspects of social relations in the aggregate, i.e. in the neighbourhood. It will be necessary to consider his suggestions, and develop the instruments of social network research further, if we want to know more about the consequences of urban environments for the quality of social life. Sodeur's considerations lead directly into Mitchell's presentation of findings from network research. If, as he states as a result of many studies in this field, "social actors create their own personal communities", people do not actually "live" in "neighbourhoods". Lynch (1960) has indeed shown that people perceive urban environments differently, and subsequent research has shed much light on this aspect. But it has not been possible, so far, to draw conclusions from this insight for the design of urban form. One of the reasons for this failure may be that we still tend to see urban environments as shells for neighbourhoods. If people do not live - or to a lesser extent - in neighbourhoods, but in "personal communities" we will have to change our view of the city considerably. 5. On the other hand, Mitchell sees social networks as being "contextualized". He means the social context mainly, but it is obvious that the physical context - see Sodeur's examples - has a strong impact on the structure of social contexts. Another of Mitchell's postulates is also important. It is only from network research that the statement can be arrived at, that is: social action is partly dependent on indirect linkages in social networks. With this statement he switches from a view on individuals to the aspect of the collective setting of the social relationships. And this is essential for understanding the neighbourhood as a social system. He sheds substantial light on the topic in question by using an example from a study on social relations of homeless people. He stresses that most of his statements mirror the situation from the view of the respondents, and have to be counter-checked by procedures which allow more objective statements on situations and he gives advice and examples of how this may be achieved. Again he demonstrates how results are determined by the particular methods of gathering data used. Still, with all reservations, we can learn much from his examples on the reciprocal relationships between social networks and physical environments. People carry their social links with them even in situations of life crisis. They do add new elements into their networks, and

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thus the structure of networks changes with crucial events. The emergence of homelessness is in itself very much a result of tensions in the network system, but public organization and housing policies do contribute both to the conditions of the event and to the potential for overcoming the crisis. These are only preliminary approaches to the better understanding of social relations in urban settings, and of the reciprocal determination of physical environments and social structures. They rest on a wealth of research findings on the meaning of social relations, on their configurations and content. And they introduce a new concept into the investigation of the quality of urban life that may help us to understand it better.

References Bott, E. (1971). Family and Social Network. London: Tavistock. Friedrichs, J. (1977). Stadtanalyse. Soziale und räumliche Organisation der Gesellschaft. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Hamm, B. (1973). Betrifft Nachbarschaft. Düsseldorf: Bertelsmann. Lynch, K. (1960). The Image of the City. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press and Harvard University Press. Mackensen, R. (1983). Soziale Netzwerke im Wandel, in Kommer, D. and B. Röhrle (Eds.), Ökologie und Lebenslagen. Tübingen/Köln: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Verhaltenstherapie und Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Gesprächspsychotherapie (Gemeindepsychologische Perspektiven 3), 61-71. (1985). Bemerkungen zur Soziologie sozialer Netzwerke, in Röhrle, B. and W. Stark (Eds.), Soziale Netzwerke und Stützsystems. Tübingen: Deutsche Gesselschaft für Verhaltenstherapie (Tübinger Reihe 6), 8-17. Pfeil, E. (1959). Nachbarkreis und Verkehrskreis in der Großstadt, in Mackensen, R. et al., Daseinsformen der Großstadt. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck), 158-225. Treinen, H. (1965). Symbolische Ortsbezogenheit, in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 17 (1965), abgedruckt in Atteslander, P. and B. Hamm (Eds.), Materialien zur Siedlungssoziologie. Köln: Kiepenheuer and Witsch 1974, 234-259.

4. Social Networks and the Quality of Life Bernhard

Badura

1 Time to Care All the industrialized societies of today have developed a more or less comprehensive system of financial support for the needy and of social and medical services. At least in Western European countries, basic physical and material needs are met either by the market mechanism or by the different kinds of social policies and programmes of the welfare state. The recent history of this country (Federal Republic of Germany), is characterized by a high level of supply of material goods and medical services. One of the major issues we are facing today is the question of whether other aspects of our quality of life have improved as well. What are the prospects for our feeling of belongingness and identity? And what are the prospects for our living an active, creative life with the opportunity and the ability to influence those parts of our social, physical and political surroundings that are important to us? Even at the very beginning of industrial civilization, sociologists like Emile Durkheim, Max Weber or Ferdinand Tönnies pointed to the fact that social changes like the separation of home and work, the reduction of the size of households, and growing urbanization might reduce the opportunity of preserving or creating strong social ties. Today we have to ask again, whether the design of our cities and the design of our work places not only affect the opportunity of preserving or creating meaningful social relationships but also even our attitudes and values towards them. Do we live in an increasingly atomized society? Do we live in a society in which an ongoing change of values even reinforces this development? There are many examples, of course, that point in the opposite direction. The social isolation of women is perhaps best broken by gainful and meaningful employment. Day nurseries give the children a wide circle of contacts. Cars and telephones are technologies that can be used to overcome social and emotional isolation. Self-help groups are a new and rapidly spreading social instrument that helps to cope effectively with problems of chronic disease and disability. The development and rapidly growing influence of the Green Party in this country reflect the responsiveness of our political system. But in spite of all this, there is growing evidence that alienation at work and in social life as well as a high degree of social and emotional isolation, especially among the elderly, seems to be a structural component of modern societies and one of the most important challenges to our welfare states.

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How can we cope with this challenge? My own ideas are threefold: 1. Psychosocial needs like the feelings of belongingness, of being accepted and loved can be met only within the context of social relationships, especially within the family and at the work place. 2. Social policy is able to protect and to promote these informal social relationships; social policy is, however, unable to be a substitute for them. 3. The need for care, or - to frame it differently - the need for stable social relationships and for supportive face-to-face interactions is not confined only to the very young or the very old, to the sick, the disabled or deviant members of our society. Care is something everybody needs in order to cope with the stress and strain of daily life. Care is a fundamental prerequisite of a meaningful social life.

2 Social Support Informal social networks are the main providers of care. That is why the quality of a society's informal networks is of great importance for the general quality of life. What are the conceptual instruments for studying social networks? What are the basic mechanisms of social and emotional support? And, finally, how are social processes related to cognitive, to emotional and to physiological processes? In the last ten to twenty years contributions to the discussion of these issues have come from a wide range of disciplines and research activities, especially from ethology (Bowlby 1984) and sociobiology (Henry and Stephens 1977), from stress research (House 1981) and social epidemiology (Broadhead et al. 1982), and most recently, even from neurobiology (Reite and Field 1985). My own research interests are, of course, much more restricted. So far my colleagues and I have been mainly interested in the influence of social relations and social processes on social, psychological and physiological wellbeing and in the role of social support as a buffer against psychosocial stress1. In our research, psychosocial care or support is conceptualized in different ways, of which the following two are the most important ones: First, the feeling of being truly loved, accepted and esteemed by a significant other or by a whole group of people. Stable social relationships with positively valued members of one's social network and their interpersonal consequences like the provision of cognitive orientation and feedback in face-to-face situations, are the main aspects of this type of social support. Second, specific signals, information or activities from the social environment that are felt to be helpful in coping with difficult problems, stressful situations or critical 1 For further information see Badura (1983, 1984, 1985), Badura and Waltz (1984) and Badura, Kaufhold, Lehmann, Pfaff, Schott and Waltz (1985).

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life-events. Members of the family, friends, workmates and neighbours and - for specific tasks and for a limited period of time - members of the helping professions are the main providers of this second type of care or support. Much social support is the result of everyday life within a community. And more often than not people become aware of it only in situations of loss of status or in situations of loss of a significant other or of otherwise subjectively important contacts. People are probably much more aware - and this is important as far as the measurement of social support is concerned - of the closeness and the adequacy of a particular social bond than they are of the particular provisions that come along with it. The theoretical clarification of the interdependencies between social relationships and interpersonal processes on the one hand and cognitive and emotional processes on the other is of a somewhat more complicated nature. The following diagram presents a very simple model of the main mechanisms of social support within the context of stress research (Figure 1).

Figure 1: A Model of Psychosocial Adaptation

Let me begin with the first box in the middle part of the diagram, that is, with the influence of social support on cognitive aspects of the coping processes. Cognitions play a central role, for example, in the way people cope with daily hazards or stressful events. Cognitive processes like the assessment of an event as threat or loss mediate between social situations and emotional reactions, and, by this, influence the whole adaptive mechanism of human beings, including their physiology and behaviour. A person selectively perceives and evaluates a situation as damaging, as irrelevant, or as positive to his or her physical or social self on the basis of his or her understanding of this situation. The psychologist Richard Lazarus calls this stage of the stress

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process the "cognitive appraisal" of a situation (Lazarus 1982). Being a sociologist myself, I would like to remind you that more than 50 years ago authors like Max Weber, George H. Mead and others had already discovered that all social objects are "interpreted" by the individual and therefore have a social meaning. That is, they are never seen as "stimuli" but as "definitions of the situation". Whether, therefore, somebody accepts social supports from others, depends on his or her relation to them and on his or her understanding of the particular supportive acts that are communicated to him. It depends on "the eye of the beholder", how the whole psychosocial coping process works. It is the "appraisal" or the "definition" of an event or a situation as either stressful or supportive that finally decides on the emotional, physiological and behavioural reactions of an individual. Information from our social environment that helps to clarify or to assess events or situations, therefore, is one of the most important forms of social support, especially in times of uncertainty or ambiguity. Let me switch now to the second box, that is, to the influence of social support on emotional processes. Information that is supposed to be reliable can help to reduce negative feelings like, for example, feelings of anxiety or uncertainty. That means information which is timely and reliable is a powerful antistressor also with respect to this second stage of the stress process. Sometimes the simple chance of having someone to talk to about one's own feelings or the chance, for example, to practice "grief work" in a situation of serious loss can be extremely helpful in regaining a certain kind of emotional balance and situational control. Sometimes the sheer presence of another member of one's informal network or the sheer presence of another human being can help to overcome negative emotions or at least to control them in some way. In emotionally more complex situations informal help may be insufficient, and people may need some kind of professional support, for example, psychotherapy. The " c a r e " (vs. "cure") dimension of medical services has to be mentioned here as well. Unfortunately, in a time of biomedical optimism and hightech medicine the care of patients has become a matter of low priority, disregarding the fact that the " c u r e " and the " c a r e " activities of medical doctors are separable in theory but not in practice. The third box deals with the self-perception of the individual as a whole, what Mead called the " I " or the "self-conception". Our self-concept is the way we think and feel about ourselves. Interpersonal processes and certain events are able to re-enforce or to damage our self-concept. Signals and messages from the social environment which tell us that we are loved and esteemed are, therefore, another powerful type of social support. In times of personal crisis esteem support becomes even more important, because it enables us to keep or to re-establish positive feelings towards ourselves. Today a steadily growing number of psychologists share the view with symbolic interactionists that a positive feeling towards oneself, that is, a feeling of self-worth or of self-efficacy, is a necessary condition for psychological well-being and a

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powerful motivating force in the process of coping with the stress of life (Gecas 1982). Esteem support from significant others either protects or enhances treasured elements of our self. With respect to psychological wellbeing, esteem support is of high preventive value. The self-concept is not just a reflection of interpersonal processes. It feeds back into them. People are not only passive receivers of a certain amount of ego-strengthening or ego-threatening signals. People are constantly engaged in actively establishing and maintaining those parts of their self-concept that are of special importance to them, like being a good father or an able professional. To put it differently: people are constantly and in all types of face-to-face situations engaged in an activity we call self-concept management. Self-concept management is a main aspect of our everyday life, especially within a society that often confronts us with new situations and new social relationships. Self-concepts are powerful sources of motivation and behaviour. So far research in social networks and social support has dealt with the influence they have on the quality of life of individuals. In the future we should concentrate on the social and technological factors and on other parts of our environment that influence their structure and quality that is, on variables that relate the macro to the micro context of our social fabric. With respect to our future social policies we should know more about how to promote or to protect supportive social bonds within the family, the work place and within our communities (see for some suggestions or examples Figure 2). Aggregates:

Figure 2: Health Promotion ("Networking")

Strategies:

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References Badura, Β. (1983). Social Epidemiology in Theory and Practice. European Monographs in Health Education, 27-50. (1984). Life-Style and Health: Some Remarks on Different Viewpoints. Social Science and Medicine, 19/4, 341-347. (1985). Zur Soziologie der Krankheitsbewältigung. Oder: Das emotionale Defizit soziologischer Handlungstheorie. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 14(5), 339-348. Badura, B. and M. Waltz (1984). Social Support and the Quality of Life Following Myocardial Infarction. Social Indicators Research, 14, 295-311. Badura, B., G. Kaufhold, Η. Lehmann, H. Pfaff, Th. Schott and M. Waltz (1985). Leben mit dem Herzinfarkt. Eine sozialepidemiologische Studie (in press). Bowlby, J. (1984). Bindung. Eine Analyse der Mutter-Kind-Beziehung. Frankfurt (Main): Fischer. Broadhead, W. E. et. al. (1982). The Epidemiological Evidence for a Relationship between Social Support and Health. Am. J. Epidemiol., 117, 527-537. Gecas, V. (1982). The Self-Concept. Ann. Rev. SocioL, 8, 1-33. Henry, J. P. and P. M. Stephens. (1977). Stress, Health, and the Social Environment. A Sociobiologie Approach. New York: Springer. House, J. S. (1981). Work-Stress and Social Support. Reading/Mass: Addison-Wesley. Lazarus, R. S. (1982). Stress and Coping as Factors in Health and Illness, in Cohen, J. et al. (Eds.), Psychological Aspects of Cancer. New York: Academic Press, 163-198. Reite, M. and T. Field (Eds.) (1985). The Psychobiology of Attachment. New York: Academic Press.

5. Social Networks in Urban Neighbourhoods Wolfgang Sodeur

1 The Impact of Urban Environment on Social Networks Starting with conclusions, let us assume that the impact will be small. There are other areas of influence like - division of labour, - technological change - assumption of functions by markets which formerly were located in households or within the neighbourhood, or - development within the educational sector and on the labour market which presumably have much more influence on local social networks. Similarly, G. Albers (1972, 244) states that, for instance, the law about opening hours for shops (in Western Germany) or the broad availability of television sets and refrigerators contributed more than city planning and environmental design to restrict urban social life in neighbourhoods and wider residential areas. But even if this opinion should be true, it would not imply that urban environments are unimportant for the future development of social networks. While most of the conditions mentioned above cannot be influenced easily, at least not in the middle range, the urban environment steadily changes and - more important - can be changed intentionally. Therefore, a profound knowledge about the relationships between properties of the urban (material) environment and of their consequences for social networks could help to preserve or restore humane conditions in urban residential quarters. Unfortunately, concrete and empirically based assumptions about these relationships are rare. Instead there are some hints, widely dispersed in the literature, on which ways, or mediated by which processes, attempts to configure urban environments may influence social networks of, and social interchange between the inhabitants. To summarize such hints and ideas I will describe four areas which define the context for potentially important relationships, and briefly discuss some of their implications.

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62 Social Networks Populations

Wolfgang Sodeur are Partly Determined

by the Demographic

Distribution

of

Local

The argument is composed of two parts: (a) Urban areas "bring together" local populations whose demographic distributions may differ radically from each other as well as from the total or "average" population, (b) The local "available" population in turn restricts otherwise possible social contacts in neighbourhoods (Sodeur 1985). A s an example I will mention two ways in which the composition of local populations may be influenced. Firstly, the centralized planning and coordinated constructing of new suburbs which happened especially (but not exclusively) after World War II in Western Europe, concentrated very special subpopulations in new suburbs (LeBras 1979,51), due to selective offers to families in special stages of the life cycle (i.e. with young children) and/or with a special level of income. Secondly, there are similar results in older residential areas due to migration and segregation (see Esser 1985 in this book). In both cases, and compared with former population compositions of urban areas, we find differences, especially concerning the homogeneity of age, stage of family development, and economic status. Little is known about the consequences of different population compositions on social networks. I don't know of any systematic and empirical investigation. But there are some loosely connected observations (due to their relatively good visibility around educational institutions), about the networks among children: Restriction to a few age cohorts around the termination date of newly constructed quarters creates groups of children which are homogeneous in age. Transfer of knowledge about traditional games is broken. Fashions arise and vanish more discontinuously. Even less is known about resulting networks among adults. From one point of view "homogeneity" of local populations would be expected to set up good conditions for densely connected neighbourhoods. It seems doubtful, however, whether this holds true generally; Simultaneous occurrence of many children within a neighbourhood may have the effect of facilitating or even making necessary some cooperation among parents. On the other hand the restriction of time budgets which occur, if both parents have a job outside the household, or extraordinary efforts due to special stages of their professional careers (indirectly related to age, too) may determine very bad conditions for social contacts, especially if they arise simultaneously and are concentrated within a neighbourhood.

Social Networks Populations

are Partly Determined

by Specific Time-Budgets

of

Local

There is some overlap between this point and the arguments discussed above: If local

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populations differ with respect to demographic variables between neighbourhoods, they also may differ with respect to their time budgets, due, for instance, to different structuring of their working hours. Empirical data analysed by M. Schlösser (1981) strongly suggest that different sorts of shift work influence frequency, intensity, and manner of social contacts. Another influential factor on time budgets connected more directly with the character of urban areas is the different degree of spacial separation between living and working. The most obvious effect is that different proportions of the local population are absent during the working hours. Additionally, there are effects on the amount of time outside working hours which is spent in the residential area, due to the time spent going between home and workplace (see Haack 1981 for the development in Hamburg between 1939 and 1970). Similar effects on time budgets are caused by spacial relations between homes and shopping facilities. It seems plausible to assume some effects of different time budgets on the development of social networks, but again we do not have any concrete information about the processes involved except in extreme cases like shift work (see above).

Social Networks are Partly Determined by Processes and Functions, Which are Located in Households, Neighbourhoods, and Wider Communities Historical studies show (see W. Sodeur 1985) that the density and structure of interpersonal relationships in neighbourhoods depend on the manner of functions which are expected to be fulfilled, and on the number of occasions which arise to fulfil them. Looking back at the development of the last two hundred years, one can conclude: Nearly all of these former functions have disappeared or have been taken over by special institutions. Telephone, ambulance, and firebrigade took over functions which formerly, at least partly, were assumed by the nearest neighbour(s), techniques for conserving food and especially the refrigerator have diminished opportunities to help each other in daily life, radio and television occupy main parts of the evening. The common byproduct of all these developments is to substitute inter-personal links with links between persons and institutions. In this respect constructional and compositional aspects of design in residential quarters will hardly gain any dominant influence. But it seems that so far as planning occurred at all, it fortified more than weakened the tendencies of "discarding functions". Much is done by local authorities to assure or at least make people believe that problems in their environment will be solved automatically, i. e., without personal engagement or without coordinated efforts by people in their neighbourhoods. Here again we know very little about the above-mentioned occasions, their range and overlap in terms of people involved and time of duration, and about their

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relationships with social contacts. Only occasionally do processes become visible when in cases of conflicts with local administrations about common interests, movements arise with intensive contacts among neighbours. But such isolated events with a limited duration don't alone guarantee the overlap and "multiplexity" (see Mitchell 1985 in this volume) of social relations which are assumed to be important to establish permanent social networks with consequences in daily life.

Social Networks are Partly Determined by Local

Opportunities

1 would like to mention here that it was this point of view with which architects and city planners have been presumably most concerned in the past: Opportunities for social contacts are facilitated by the shape of buildings and their environment, i.e., by the shape of "central places", the compositions of parks, etc. We believe, however, that spatial opportunities alone are not sufficient: Even "nice places" are only sometimes accepted, and less beautiful, but more "functional" places (i.e., washing facilities for cars) may induce more communicational acts among neighbours. Additional opportunities for social contacts arise from the neighbourhood of locations where activities take place, or from the crossing of paths from and to such locations. While paths for traffic up to a certain amount, i.e., on main roads or in public buildings, usually are located with the intention of avoiding cross-roads as far as possible, it is not obvious what the underlying intentions for the location of pathways in residential areas are. A pilot study by students consisting of unstructured inspection of residential quarters showed relatively little variation: Children's playing grounds, washing facilities for cars, clothes-horses, places for recreation, sports etc. seem to be carefully separated from each other, so that crossing with possible conflicts, but also with chances for social contacts are avoided.

2 Urban Environments and Social Networks: How to Study Network Properties in Large Populations? There are many ways in which the architecturally formed environment may influence either the development or the maintenance of social networks. In the absence of empirically confirmed knowledge we illustrated these relations with some examples and showed how different properties of residential quarters work indirectly on social networks, via: - the selection of persons who live within a neighbourhood, - the time which inhabitants of an urban neighbourhood usually have available to stay and to do something in or nearby their homes,

Social Networks

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Neighbourhoods

- the need for common activities, for interpersonal help, etc. within neighbourhood, - the opportunities to get into contact with each other.

Concepts of Structural

65 a

Properties

We now will look more systematically at the relationships assumed and ask: What are the properties of social networks which are to be considered as depending on the urban environment and should therefore be investigated in future research? Recapitulating the areas of influence which were discussed above, we easily see that different "levels" of social networks are implied: - Some proposals imply effects on the level of individuals (monads) or pairs (dyads), i.e.: Under certain circumstances people get higher chances to come into contact with certain neighbours or get to know more neighbours than otherwise. - Other proposals are concerned with effects on the population as a whole, i.e.: Under certain circumstances the population of an urban quarter will be densely connected, will be well (that is in all its parts) informed about special events, will be easily activated in the event of common problems etc. - Finally, some proposals imply effects anywhere in between the individual's and the population's level, i.e.: Under certain circumstances inhabitants of a quarter get higher chances to come into contact with other people of the same or of another age, stage of the life cycle, socio-economic stratum etc., or: Multiple affiliation of people to different organizations in their residential quarter (like church, sport clubs etc.) overlap to a certain degree and have consequences for the quality of social relations and for the reachability of persons in the neighbourhood.

Units of

Observation

Separate from decisions about the properties to be looked for, we should keep another question in mind: On which level should we gather the data or, in other terms, which units of observation are to be chosen? (see P. F. Lazarsfeld and H. Menzel 1969). There seems to be agreement (but little systematic research) that the basic units of information should concern the single link between two persons, organizations etc, regardless of which higher structural level is finally intended for analysis. I will not discuss this point intensively, but illustrate the problem by a simple example. Suppose that we want to study the number of contacts which people within a residential area have with other persons. We can think of this number as the acquaintance volume of persons; more formally it is called the "degree" or, in the case of asymmetrical relations, as liking someone or possessing power over him,

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Sodeur

depending on the direction of the relations either as the "indegree" or "outdegree". Principally, we can handle the degree as if it were a personal property or "absolute" property (see Lazarsfeld and Menzel 1969) and ask each person directly to give us this information. But there are doubts whether an informant will be able to answer this question in a valid and reliable manner. Therefore, several alternatives for collecting the information have been proposed (see Granovetter 1976, 1278); they have in common that data collection concerns single links, and information about the degree is derived by aggregating the links of each person. For reasons of simplification let us accept now, and for the rest of this paper, that (a) data collection has to be restricted to the level of single links and (b) that valid and reliable "measurement" of these links is possible (for details see Bernard, Killworth and Sailer 1981; Hammer 1984; Romney and Weiler 1984). As a consequence, in nearly all cases of network research the units of observation differ from the units of analysis. How can we assure the correct connection of both levels? There are two answers to this question: The first (rather trivial) answer concerns the conditions of data collection: Links have to be collected in the same structural context as they are used analytically. This means, in respect to the examples above: To derive the acquaintance volume from interpersonal links, one has to aggregate all the links of one and the same person, who defines in this case an extremely simple "structural context". Respecting special constellations of links in triads of persons, one has to combine all links connecting only these three persons as the context. The principle is quite simple. Nevertheless, it has important consequences for the technical procedure for gathering data in "large" populations. We will come back to this point later. But what about network properties for which the proper structural context contains more than a few people and their interrelationships? What shall we do, for instance, if we want to investigate the "reachability" within a population, which is defined as the number of people a person can reach via direct or indirect contacts? In terms of the "first answer" above, the structural context here is the whole population. But obviously, if we should take into account links among all the people, our problem becomes intractable for large populations. This brings us to the second answer.

Measurement

Theory

Instead of assuring the connection between the units of observation and the units of analysis by physical conditions (i.e., by the "structural context" of data collection) we now try to do this by (hopefully correct) assumptions. An example will help again: A. Rapoport and W. J. Horvath in 1961 (see also Fararo and Sunshine 1964) compared social networks with random nets respecting properties like the just mentioned "reachability". They succeeded in describing differences between social

Social Networks in Urban

Neighbourhoods

67

networks and random nets ("biased net theory") by a few structural parameters ("biases") only, namely by the outdegrees (first level), the proportion of symmetrical links in pairs of persons ("parent bias"; second level), and the proportion of links between persons already linked by a third person ("sibling bias"; third level; for details see Hummell and Sodeur 1984, 516). As far as the "biased net theory" is correctly stated, it "bridges" between concepts of micro- and macro-structure: It relates the ("low-level") data outdegree, parentand sibling-bias to the ("high-level") concept reachability. The former are properties which can be made potentially available by means of empirical research, the latter is a property which we may want to investigate but which (in large populations) we cannot examine directly. Of course, there is no guarantee that we can correctly apply the "biased net theory" to the specific network under study, but this theory is empirically confirmed fairly well within different social networks, so that, as a measurement theory, it may be trusted more than many other measurement theories which are used in daily research. It should be mentioned that there are other empirically studied theories about networks which can be used as measurement theories, connecting dyadic and triadic to global properties of networks (see Hummell and Sodeur 1984, 527).

Sampling

Procedures

Now we come back to the empirical examination of observational units, restricted to links or to constellations of links among a few (in practice maximally three) persons. If data collection of all units is prohibited by reason of a large population, random sampling is the normal solution. At first glance it seems to be straightforward to sample observational units in their proper structural context, i.e., to sample: - pairs of persons A and B, if data about links between A and Β are to be collected, or - triads of persons A, B, and C, if data about special constellations of links in triads are to be be gathered, and so on. With a population of size N, we draw, for instance, a random sample with np ( " p " for pair) out of a total of JVx(JV-l)/2 pairs and ask the selected persons about their links to each other. If we find np' (symmetric) links among the np pairs selected, the proportion of links in the sample (i.e., np'lnp) is an unbiased estimate of the proportion of links ("density") in the total network. Granovetter (1976) showed, however, that this procedure in most cases will not be very efficient. When sampling pairs with a sample size of np c Nx(N-1)/2, either np oilxnp persons have to be asked about their contacts (depending on whether or not both persons of a pair are to be interviewed). Because it is usually much more costly to get into contact with a new informant than to ask an old one additional

68

Wolfgang Sodeur

questions, Granovetter proposed some sort of cluster sampling, namely to draw a random sample of η people and ask each person about links to each of the n - 1 other persons. By this procedure, parameters like indegrees or outdegrees or the density of links within a population can also be estimated without bias, but the number of persons to be asked will be reduced drastically: If pairs are the units of interest and the sample is "small" (i.e. n filli 1*111 1 1*11 111*1 IUI* *

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the resulting blocks are of trivial size. The result is a dendrogram showing the block structure of the network as a whole. Figure 2 displays the dendrogram produced in this way. This dendrogram reflects the structure of Mrs Wyatt's network as she perceives it when all the different aspects of the relationships she has with the members of her

Network

85

Procedures

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Figure 2: Dendrogram of CONCOR Blocks in Mrs Wyatt's Network

network are taken into account. The structure now is somewhat clearer than that derived from the analysis of "close" links alone. The major division in her perception of relationships is between the people Mrs Wyatt has befriended after she was assaulted by her co-habitee and those she knew before. The former are made up of the two social workers attached to the women's aid group and several friends she had made in the women's aid centre while she was there. Separated from these people, in Mrs Wyatt's view, are her own kin and her co-habitee and his kin. Within the larger group of people linked to her before her homelessness crisis she saw her own kin (amongst whom she saw her former husband as having similar relationships with the others as her own kin) as distinct from the kin attached to her co-habitee. The structure of relationships as Mrs Wyatt saw it can be represented effectively by a network diagram as in Figure 3. This diagram is produced by arranging the members of the network according to the order established by the partitioning of the matrices by CONCOR procedures. Each line linking members of the network is drawn in degrees of thickness to represent the multiplexity of the links. The maximum multiplexity would be represented by a fivestranded link, i.e. frequency more than once monthly, self-defined closeness of degree 3, convivial links, the giving of practical aid, and the provision of emotional support. A partly broken line indicates that the link was asymmetric. The three clusters depicted by the dendrogram appear quite clearly. On the right-hand side are the respondent, the women's aid workers and the friends Mrs Wyatt had made in the refuge. It is clear that she saw the ties between herself and the women's aid worker Β

86

J. Clyde

Mitchell

Figure 3: Multiplex Relationships Among and Within CONCOR Blocks of Mrs Wyatt's Network

and her friends Β and C as particularly close. In the lower left segment are the kin of her co-habitee and the co-habitee himself. In the top left segment are the four kin of Mrs Wyatt amongst whom she saw the ties between her mother and her sister A and her husband as particularly strong. She saw her ex-husband as completely isolated from all other members in the network. Note that her own links with her own kin were very weak. The only way in which she was able to contact her co-habitee was through either her sister and her sister's husband via her mother or through her friend A whom she had known when her relationships with her co-habitee were more friendly. The original matrices may now be rearranged in terms of the ordering produced by the C O N C O R analysis. These rearranged matrices on which the block structure have been marked are displayed in Table 4. In contrast we might consider the network of Mrs Maxwell. Mrs Maxwell was Irish and she had moved to England with her husband in search of work. They had been squatting in various buildings while looking for work. It was while she was living in

Network Procedures

87

Table 4: Matrices Rearranged by CONCOR Procedures RPí'sSNGEMfcf.'T 5Y c, S E I 0 i P/3CC R "A N/i R ¿5 I E PROCEDURES &»SïO :n j f i » : r ìnc column s o l u t i o n s REARRANGE^ «ÄTRI* Ν L M c E R 1: W Y A Τ Τ . R "κ Ε Ν/υ 5 Ρ 3 * Ε Ν 111111 1 11 15°i7342C3912345^7 1 15 13 16 17 13 1» z

10 S 9 U 12 3