A blog post I wrote as part of The City Builder Book Club (organized by The Centre for City Ecology and Creative Urban Projects) went up this week! So please check it out along with the rest of the fantastic posts on there when you have a chance. The book this time around is Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and my post is in response to Chapter 19, “Visual order: its limitations and possibilities.”

In the CBBC post, I briefly mention the twin ideas of image-making and place-making, two methods of meaning-making in the city that I think are worth discussing a bit more in depth. So I thought I’d add a post here to supplement the CBBC one with a little bit more critical theory (because who doesn’t need more critical theory, right?).

Defining Place-making & Image-making

Place-making has become a bit of a buzzword in city-building circles these days, frequently uttered by top-down designers and bottom-up advocates alike. The admirable goal of place-making is to reinstate the social connection to specific physical locations lost in the last century of city-building. Place-making is, in a sense, a backlash against the late 19th century idea of “the masses”—some unified general public defined by statistics and demographics. As Charles Jencks observes in The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, both the mass-projects of modernist architects and the mass-products of most developers have in common a failure to draw meaningful connections to their users. They either prescribe the taste of users in the former case, or regurgitate a statistically average, efficiently inoffensive taste in the latter. Neither strategy grasps the complexity or depth of meaning a building or a public space can have. In response, place-making hopes to create more meaningful meanings, so to speak.

Image-making, on the other hand, has less of a positive reputation. Its association with corporate branding often positions it as one of the enemies of place-making. However, often the same people who denounce the effect of big business on cities still shop at the grocery store and the mall, even if they also shop at the Farmers’ Market and the local mom-and-pop. And they certainly breathe a sigh of relief when they see a familiar brand in a foreign land. Our lives are complicated and demand a diversity of ways to understand what’s around us, particularly when we’re on the road—a growing lifestyle in our increasingly connected world.

In fact, I would argue that image-making and place-making are a complementary pair of urban phenomena that help govern how we understand and structure our cities.

At the most basic level, place-making aims to form socio-spatial depth structures, while image-making aims to form socio-spatial breadth structures. Deep connections to a place are created through a matrix of habitual practices and enduring collective knowledge. In other words, much of what makes a space a place actually comes from the people who inhabit it and use it, often over a long period of time, rather than from the space itself.

Socio-spatial breadth has a much more macro-scale function. Its creation relies less on longterm, localized, stable social structures, and in fact operates quite comfortably in a context of profound and rapid social flux. Socio-spatial breadth in the urban landscape allow foreigners to navigate a new city with some ease. Going as far back as the obelisks of Sixtus V’s Rome that helped pilgrims locate important churches in the city, instantaneously recognizable landmarks have helped travellers understand numerous cities with one simple technique. In our contemporary world of global mobility, the new socio-spatial breadth offered by image-making allows us to cut across place much more efficiently, to be familiar with the foreign.

Image-making: Technological Reproducibility

Images in our contemporary context are inseparable from their reproducibility. Mechanical printing and its subsequent iterations have decreased the costs of reproducing an image exponentially, and with this quantitative change in the sheer number of images, a qualitative change has taken place as well. In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin posits that all phenomena (natural and synthetic, though his argument primarily focuses on art) have a “cult value”—a sense of almost religious authority that stems from their originality, their individuality—which Benjamin calls their “aura.” He goes on to argue that the mechanical reproduction and subsequent proliferation of an image depletes its aura. For example, think about the Mona Lisa; one of the most common reactions I’ve ever heard regarding seeing this highly reproduced painting in person is disappointment, particularly about its size.

Place-making relies on the authority of a place’s aura, a particular way of knowing and appreciating a place that cannot translate in reproduction. You can’t make a poster that fully expresses what it feels like to go to the local Farmers’ Market every weekend, or to sit in your favourite coffee shop watching the street, or to be able to trust a stranger at a local park. Conversely, image-making relies on the proliferation of reproductions, and consequently, originals that are conducive to reproduction. Both strategies can build meanings about the city, but true place-making happens slowly, organically, and locally. Image-making is often used by designers in the place of place-making because it can be manufactured instantly through a concerted effort (read: brute force), and its scope of effect is limited only by budget and ambition.

The recent terms “starchitecture” and “magazine architecture” express the tremendous effect that image-making has had on city design in recent years. As Hal Foster observes in The Art-Architecture Complex, many of the foremost architects of our age primarily produce “quasi-abstract building as Pop sign or media logo,” combining “the willful monumentality of modern architecture with the faux-populist iconicity of postmodern design” (Foster, 15). For Torontonians, you need only visit the ROM to understand what Foster is getting at. Somehow, this new wave of architecture manages to rectify the modernist trope of creating monolithic tributes to material, structure, and technology with the postmodern trope of the decorated shed—the meaning of a building applied as a sort of veneer, like signage on the commercial developments of sprawl. While remaining completely non-representational, the ROM’s Crystal is designed to be read in an instant, and reproduced ad infinitum; its gesture is so simple that it is even reproduced in the ROM’s three-colour logo.

The Crystal’s strategy of image-making will take their reputation much further than a local park can go with place-making, because the experience of the Crystal is simple, reproducible; the postcard is nearly analogous to the real thing: the primary difference is quantitative rather than qualitative, i.e. it’s bigger in real life. From the traveller’s point of view, the network created by institutions with such long reach provides a series of major anchor points from which to understand the city. As simplistic emissaries of a city’s culture, they allow the traveller to name the foreignness they feel, to pin it down and strip it of its authority and danger. The Eiffel Tower and the Louvre—on some level they are Paris.

Image-making: Technological Reproducibility 2.0

Benjamin’s concept of aura and its depletion relies partly on the idea of an original. If there is no original, there can be no aura to deplete. As Benjamin notes, film is perhaps the medium most detached from the cult of the aura. It relies on multiplicity and proliferation as an intrinsic part of its form, and in this way, the relationship of authority between image and observers is reversed: the authority lies with “the masses” rather than with the film itself. Even if the print of the film they’re watching is the first ever produced, it doesn’t change the experience of the work, at least not like the leap from a poster to a painting.

In architecture, an equivalent to film can be found in cookie-cutter fast food restaurants and the recurring typologies of the subway station, the supermarket, the mall, the big-box store, the hotel, etc. If the ROM’s Crystal is architecture for reproduction, these urban phenomena are architecture as reproduction. They form the image of a corporation or institution in aggregate, and yet each part is also representative of the whole. When you say “McDonalds” you ambivalently mean any McDonalds, every McDonalds.

The process of image-making that these large organizations undertakes for their own gain results in urban spaces that anthropologist Marc Augé appropriately calls “non-places.” In his words, non-places are spaces “which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity” (Augé, 77-78). You might notice a similarity between the notion of the non-place and Jencks’ complaints about architecture for “the masses,” but the differences are both subtle and crucial. In Jencks’ formulation, the meanings are prescriptive: you end up living uncomfortably in someone else’s taste and by someone else’s rules; in Augé’s formulation, the meanings are contractual: you submit to someone else’s taste and rules for mutual benefit.* Entering Augé’s non-places can actually be quite a freeing, pleasant experience, like checking in at the airport, relieved of your luggage, able to wander and shop in clean, air-conditioned anonymity.

If the first kind of image-making allows travelers to pin down foreignness, the second kind masks foreignness. These urban spaces form a socio-spatial breadth structure that nearly all of us have in common, and what’s more, they give us roles as people that we all have in common as well: “Anthopological place is formed by individual identities, through complicities of language, local references, the unformulated rules of living know-how; non-place creates the shared identity of passengers, customers or Sunday drivers” (Augé, 101). The result is that the ever more common traveler feels “always, and never, at home” (Augé, 109):

A foreigner lost in a country he does not know (a ‘passing stranger’) can feel at home there only in the anonymity of motorways, service stations, big stores or hotel chains. For him, an oil company logo is a reassuring landmark; among the supermarket shelves he falls with relief on sanitary, household or food products validated by multinational brand names (Augé, 106).

My own experience with the non-place can best be summed up by the first time (quickly followed by the second time) I saw the new ONroute service stations that line Highway 401 in Ontario. I can remember turning to my dad next to me and saying, “Wow! That service station actually looks like a real building!” Their sleek architecture seemed remarkably individual and unlikely amongst the barren landscape of the 401; I felt the aura of the building, so to speak. Several miles down the road, my feelings about the building were profoundly changed when I saw my second ONroute station—absolutely identical to the first one in every detail of its unique architectural form, as though it were copy-and-pasted. The aura was gone.

It was the first time I had experienced a new attempt at image-making. I realized that I had taken for granted the ubiquitous familiarity that brands provide on the road. Somehow, I had imagined that they had always been there. In reality, several years from now someone else will see the ONroute buildings as they are intended to be seen: with the same kind of reliable, ubiquitous traveler’s comfort that I feel toward other brands.

Image-making and place-making may be at odds with one another sometimes, however both do in fact make our lives easier and more meaningful, in their own ways. We crave both: to engage deeply with our surroundings and to turn off and trust the system; to feel like we really have a home and to be at home anywhere; to stay and to go.

Notes:

*Ironically, Jencks partly repeats the fallacy that he rails against: he perpetuates the concept of “the masses” by failing to recognize the agency of people who frequent these spaces. He invests too much power in the spaces themselves, when really people aren’t subjected to faux-historical, developer-built hotels, they choose to stay in them. That said, Modernist projects are a different matter.