Architectural journalist Phil Griffin : “How anyone can say that popular culture does not influence the changes to our cities, that popular culture doesn’t spark urban regeneration, is beyond me. It has more influence on cities than anything else.”
Now Richard Florida – who measures the underlying factors common to American cities and regions with the highest level of creative economic growth – might have got it wrong. (Economics is tricky business, after all, and I won’t pretend to fully understand.)
But Dan Hill and Justin O’Connor – in their 1997 article Cottonopolis and Culture: Contemporary Culture and Structural Change in Manchester – might have got it right by focussing on “the burning question of local cultures, a sense of belonging, the ability to feel part of a wider set of institutional, ethical and familial structures, [and] the ability to live within a workable narrative account of our lives and our communities lives.”
Dan Hill revisited his interest in Raymond William’s idea of “structure of feeling” or “the distilled residue of the organization of the lived experience of a community over and above the institutional and ideological organization of the society” to ask:
What sense of a community exists and pervades over time? What is immediately discernable about a community within a particular space, based on their repeated interactions and shared understanding over time? How does the space engender these shared histories?
Fourteen months after Dan’s post, emerging technologies for the city have come into full vogue, but his questions remain underexplored.
Before we go on designing new technologies or new cities or new technological cities, I think we need to be more (critically) aware of what is at play in the spaces of everyday life. Last week I posted at PLSJ on Eric Laurier’s research into cafes and civic life in the contemporary city, and I’m most curious about how gaining these types of understanding might be built right into the design process…
Any ideas?