SPACELAB

research laboratory
for the contemporary city

>> Neighbourhood spatial processes: Faculty of Architecture

Delft University of Technology
Notes on Public Space, 'Thick' Space, Berlageweg 1
2628 CR Delft
Scale and Centrality spacelab@bk.tudelft.nl
www.spacelab.tudelft.nl

Stephen Read
s.a.read@bk.tudelft.nl

1.0 Urban Centrality

To talk of urban centrality and public space may sound a little old fashioned,
the subject of wishful thinking or misty-eyed nostalgia. The city is of course
changing - seemingly torn apart by the exploding scales and speeds of the
processes playing themselves out there, and we sometimes think of the
dynamism of these spatial processes as being foreign to the city as it once
was, and often still is in its historical cores - as if the new 'space of flows' is
conceptually incompatible with a fundamentally static 'space of places'
(Castells, 1996). But the richness of these traditional 'places' is just as much
a product of life patterns in motion as is the fragmentation of the experiential
and social fabric of the city on it's periphery. The city and change are no
strangers to each other and cities have burst beyond the constraints of their
edges before. The space of the city has always existed in a tension between
inside and outside, between the local and larger scales, and between inhab-
itant and the traveller, trader or stranger. It is possible to overstate present-
day change and to imagine that all that we know about cities from their his-
tories is becoming irrelevant - and also to lose sight of the importance of cen-
trality and a rich diversity of scales in any story about the city. Those who
claim the city is becoming uniformly generic without centrality and peripher-
ality, and without public space, haven't been shopping in my neighbourhood.
Of course there is a new city emerging and of course it is recasting the ques-
tion about the nature of the city - but it is forcing us to reappraise our con-
cepts of what both the old city of centres and peripheries and our new dis-
persed 'generic' city are. The two continue to coexist alongside one another
- as indeed they did before the terms generic or edge city were ever coined.
And the reappraisal can do as much to help us to understand what the nature
of centrality is as it can help us to understand what the diffusing and invad-
ing generic city is.

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

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

But if the city is a machine, what sort of machine is it? What is clear is that it
is not the sort of machine that has a very clear programmatic aim, or neces-
sarily any built in programmatic aim at all. Nor is it a machine for supporting
something like community or neighbourhood or economy or anything like
that, though it may eventually do all these things as a lucky consequence of
what it was doing in the first place. I suggest that the city is, or rather has
been in its best moments, a machine for supporting intelligibility and for sup-
porting interface - interface between people, and particularly interface
between people operating and doing things at different scales. We are talk-
ing here about networks of course and about the ways networks at different
scales overlap each other and then interface in the urban field. I believe that
we can talk here about both virtual networks and those networks of social and
economic contact and interaction built into the spatial infrastructures of
streets squares and public and private transport networks, but here I will be
considering these effects as they play out within and affect the quality of pub-
lic space.
2
 But the city, because it is not programmatically specific, is also a machine for
change. The city, as a field or background for human activity, will absorb the
dominant activities of the time - form 'permanences' (Harvey, 1996) or
encrustations of relatively ephemeral programmatic and institutional stuff
around the urban spatial network structure, which can change as the city
changes from for example an industrial base to a services base to an enter-
tainment and tourist base. The city organises and structures human activity,
but it does this according to a principle of scale not a principle of programme,
and different scales are held in relation to each other in a way which supports
intelligibility and coherence.

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

There is another kind of space with which many of us (especially designers)

are even more familiar, which involves codes for the production of our phys-
ical environment, some of which are so familiar they have become almost
invisible. This space is much more closely tied to issues of territory and
bounding. It is about the parts which make up wholes, about areas which are
assumed to have a certain autonomy and about the relations between them.
Many of our familiar ideas about neighbourhood, about urban functional
zones and so on are based in a basic framework of bounded areas and the
relations between them.

This conception of space leads to a fundamentally different view of neigh-

bourhood - or more generally 'the local' - and its relations with the rest of the
city than does that of the idea of different scales of network interfacing each
other in a structured manner. On the one hand we have a patchwork of local
zones with relations between themselves, and on the other we have relations
between local networks and higher scales - these higher scales acting as net-
work systems in their own right and mediating relations between local zones.

In fact if we look at neighbourhoods in a lot of more traditional cities it is clear

that neighbourhood is not this clearly bounded phenomenon. Neighbourhood
3 seems difficult to delimit spatially and seems to be something which emerges
 out of urban processes, rather than being the result of bounding intended to
control urban processes. The second spatial framework mentioned above
has been used for the more planned production of urban space but the first
(that of flux) has always produced urban space, especially where the more
conscious and deliberate process of the second has not dominated. Today,
the first spatial process is again becoming more insistent and taking over
from the second as the flows in our urban landscape speed up and escape
the control of the spatial techniques and practices of planning and design.
The space of flux has always produced urban space in more organic settle-
ments, where preconceived ideas of neighbourhood or of urban programme
do not form a prestructuring framework. Rather the prestructuring framework
in organic settlements is more directly influenced by everyday life processes
and their patterns, especially those related to mobility.

The notion of a public space is one of those seemingly self-evident ideas

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

3.0 Urban fabrics and their typologies

To talk about produced social environments as typologies or shapes of lay-
out is ineffective without talking at the same time about typologies or shapes
of use. And as soon as one starts talking about use, we can no longer talk
about that layout without considering the way that everyday patterns of use
4 and activity weave an area into the surrounding fabric and beyond. In a sense
 the interwoven patterns of peoples everyday activities becomes the fabric of
the city of our social and cultural experience. The expanding everyday
processes of the new city and new patterns of use are producing new envi-
ronments on the periphery. But they are also often emphasising the dynam-
ic, connective, integrative aspect of use and space in centres and giving rise
to programmatically different ways of using the city in the centre that
nonetheless (in many or most cases) do not fall outside of the capacities of
central urban space for programmatic adaptation and change.

The city sometimes looks to be unravelling - processes of mobility and habi-

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

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

5
 3.1 A neighbourhood within the inner city

Figure 1. A local relational space.

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

Figure 2.
An inner-city neighbourhood. Local relational space superimposed over the physical layout.
Mapping trajectories through the physical layout generates the social space.

6
 The diagram is of course a gross simplification, and represents relations
between nodes as abstracted topological connections. But consider how
these connections are going to be translated into movement through the
actual geometry of the layout, and one gets a sense of the way that members
of the same group could meet on the street in the course of their everyday
activities. Mapping trajectories through the physical layout therefore gener-
ates the social space one finds on the street.

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

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

The local social space in a traditional urban neighbourhood is also subject to

certain characteristic urban scale differentiations and hierarchies, as in the
difference between streets which are quiet and residential and those where
shopping and facilities concentrate - typically on the high-street, where local
people and those from outside the neighbourhood are co-present. Within the
normal compass therefore of a person's daily neighbourhood activities and
within the local walkable neighbourhood, there are not one but two scales of
urban activity. Contact and co-presence is made on a daily basis not only with
immediate neighbours but also with people from outside the neighbourhood
who use the shops and other facilities on the high streets. Although the high
streets serve as traffic arteries they are in no way specialised as such. I will
illustrate this further in my discussion of the example.
It is interesting to note that the neighbourhood 'territory' is not simplistically
bounded, but is defined in a relational way and that it is this that allows and
supports the social and cultural overlap and diversity that we find in traditional
7 urban space.
 3.2 A neighbourhood on the periphery

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

In contrast, neighbourhood and community on the periphery is in general

founded on territory that is about the bounding or encapsulation of land - gen-
erally in the interstices between specialised movement routes. These neigh-
bourhoods tend also to be more socially and culturally homogeneous while
social and commercial facilities tend to become segregated from the housing
and concentrated in more 'generic' capsules of malls and 'centres' of various
types, accessed through the specialised mobility network. Relations which
may have been local in the centre, embedded in the neighbourhood and in
the local social space, have become distantiated and accessible only through
the specialised mobility network.

3.3 The territorial gradient; capturing the spatial/social typology

Figure 5.
8 An inner-city neighbourhood. Territorial gradient.
 Figure 6.
A neighbourhood on the periphery. Territorial gradient.

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

The local social space in the area on the periphery is much reduced com-
pared with that in the urban centre. This is not to suggest that no distantiat-
ed relationships exist in social patterns in the inner city, simply that in the
process represented by the change from urban life to suburban, relations
which were local have tended to become distantiated. The relative social
homogeneity of new residential areas and the use of private transport in local
areas means that relations between different local social spaces are effec-
tively eliminated. These factors have a serious consequence for the 'shape'
of public space as it is defined by these relations. Consider the outline I have
traced around the public space that is effectively experienced by the people
whose territorial gradients are drawn here. The thick shape of the public
space for the inner-city neighbourhood is a consequence of the richness of
connection between local relational and social spaces. The thinness of the
experience of public space in the neighbourhood on the periphery is a direct
9 consequence of the lack of this richness of connectedness and co-presence.
 Another serious transformation in the 'shape' of this set of relations is the loss of
the scale represented in the centre by the high street. The simple pattern of
mobility network and attached 'capsules' means that the largest generic and the
smallest local scales predominate and the middle scales of direct connection to
adjacent areas is lost, along with the economic and cultural advantages this kind
of connection can be seen to generate in inner city areas like the Pijp in
Amsterdam.

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

4.0 The spatial mechanics of the local and middle scales

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

We can understand from our experience of traditional urban space the charac-
teristic distinction in any local area between relatively busy streets and relatively
much quieter ones. I am arguing that this is a principle feature of the spatial
mechanism - one that designers often understand intuitively. When we look at
plans of cities we can usually pick out with some degree of accuracy which are
going to be the busy streets just by their geometrical attributes. My work with spa-
tial models has established this systematically and I have been using these mod-
els to investigate the relationship between the high-street and the area around it.
In particular how the relationship between high-street and area radically influ-
ences the character of both high street and the lesser-used streets comprising
10 the area (Read, 2001).
 It is in fact this interaction between the high-street and the area - between
therefore the scale of the local neighbourhood and the urban scales just
above that of the neighbourhood - which seems to determine a lot of the char-
acter and commercial and social functioning of urban spaces.

4.1 The Pijp neighbourhood in Amsterdam

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

Figure 7a. Figure 7b.

Ferdinand Bolstraat, the Pijp Jacob van Campenstraat, the Pijp

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

11
 Figure 8. Map of the Pijp neighbourhood in Amsterdam.

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

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

12
 Figure 9a. Figure 9b.
The Stadhouderskade - running east-west. The Centuurbaan - running east-west.

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

Figure 10a. Figure 10b.

The Ferdinand Bolstraat - running north-south. The van Woustraat - running north-south.

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

13
 Figure 11a.
The Pijp: point depth diagram showing direct links from the Stadhouderskade and Centuurbaan
with the interior of the area (in green).
Figure 11b.
The Pijp: point depth diagram showing direct links from the Ferdinand Bolstraat and van
Woustraat with the interior of the area (in green).

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

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

But while it is clear that the Ferdinand Bolstraat and the van Woustraat relate
strongly to the local area, the link with the wider city is also strong, and the
people on these streets and the clientele in the shops are by no means
restricted to people from the local neighbourhood. Rather this is also a pop-
ular medium-priced shopping area for people from other parts of Amsterdam
and even for visitors from out of town.
14
 While spatial hierarchies are reflected functionally through a concentration of
shopping and activity in the circuit defined by the crossing of the high-street
axes, this is by no means the end of the story. The openness of the area
engendered by the simple open grid ensures that though the functional hier-
archies are clear they are by no means rigid. Shopping penetrates the interi-
or of the area, where rentals are cheaper and where non-prime positions are
taken by second-hand shops, bicycle and other repair shops, specialist food
shops, restaurants, cafes etc.

Figure 12a. Figure 12b.

Gerald Douplein Albert Cuyp Market

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

Figure 13a.
Frans Halsstraat.
15
 A contrary effect to this infusion of movement and activity into the interior of
the large 'block' bounded by the major high-street spaces, can be observed
on the other sides of the Ferdinand Bolstraat and the van Woustraat. Here
the grids are also extremely open but the effects of the pull of strong high-
street spaces does not work across the area itself, given that the spaces on
the other sides of these areas exert a much weaker attraction than do the four
streets already mentioned.

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

5.0 Summing up: Places of flows

Multiple overlapping processes and their respective scales are coordinated
within public space by the fact that they are grounded in material flows with-
in a real urban spatial connective context. The grounding of these processes
draws the spatial factor into the equation with its specific configurations of
spatial connection, permeability and resistance. The Pijp shows how the
structure produced within this spatial context may order the details of urban
circumstance as well as patterns of social interface in the surface of the city,
differentiating volumes and scales of movement and activity, and formally
articulating the city as a intelligible field for everyday use.

What I can begin to propose, is that certain spatial layouts, characterised by

openness and transparency at the local scale, combined with strong con-
nection to their surroundings at the scale immediately above the local, offer
the necessary spatial-structural qualities to support the sort of structured
diversity, overlap and busy-ness characteristic of well-functioning central
urban locations. They enable a multiplicity of use which is at the same time
spatially and functionally articulated and intelligible. These environments
absorb and sustain a life of the city, structured around but not determined by
the scales of the local and the wider city. The particular social and cultural
vitality of these environments is underpinned by a rich overlap of social and
cultural meanings constructed within relational spaces - where individual and
group territories are specific and clear without being exclusive, and relations
between the local and the middle urban scales is strong and direct.

These environments also underpin a potential for change. It is the strength of

places like the Pijp that they are capable of changing in tune with changing
times - in fact it is often on the streets of places like this that we first notice
that social or cultural change is taking place. Here periodic decline has
16 always been followed by new awakenings, with new street cultures and
 economies growing up to replace older ones as wider social and economic
orders are transformed. The 'permanences' - comprising particular material
encrustations of function and culture - break down as social and economic
conditions change, but the underlying structure, founded in space and in
mobility remains, around which new encrustations, emerging from new social
and economic conditions, may form.

Urban centrality is constructed on movement flows and activity patterns with-

in the urban spatial matrix. It is constructed on a dynamic and is itself dynam-
ic. A conception of urban centrality and place founded in these ideas may
offer a framework both for investigating the shifting fortunes of urban centres
and locations as they respond to shifts in the scales and circuits of these
flows in the city the region and beyond, and for designing vital urban places
capable of supporting a rich mix of urban life and culture.

17
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OASE 54, Winter 2001, 50-61.

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

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

Blackwell, Oxford.

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

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

Read, S. forthcoming in Space Syntax I, 2002, 'The Patchwork Landscape

and the 'Engendineered' Web; Space and Scale in the Dutch City',
Available as working paper.

Robinson, JW. (2001), 'Institutional Space, Domestic Space and Power:

Revisiting Territoriality with Space Syntax.' As yet unpublished paper
presented at the Third International Symposium on space Syntax,
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta.

18