Philosophical Urban Theories: The Real(m) of Relph

The only knowledge I had of theories going into urban design were those glossed over when studying Corbusier in a mandatory architectural history class. As you'd imagine when you're in a stuffy lecture hall with 60 other people, who just like you all have better things to do on a Thursday morning at 8a.m. and who all don't want to be there, much of that information is retained. But as I was delving into the world of Urban Design theories I started to feel that knowledge come back to me. As I found I do not much care for theories about the outcome or being (form) of urban design but rather what formed the ideals that created what we know today as urban design I quickly found myself drawn back to Corbusier’s Contemporary City. Steeping in societal ideals it dealt with rationalization and choreography; moving parts to make a whole. The tagline for societal theory is “the city as an expression of society”, I stared at that statement for hours. How can a city form society when that forms it itself? I found myself much more intrigued and conflicted with the question “what makes a city?” than I was about the cities effects.

Looking further into philosophical urban design theories I came across the name Edward Relph. I had never heard of him before nor had I read his work but he addresses what I was questioning all this time “what makes a place what it is?”. There seems to be so much time spent nowadays on where something is, and how to get there, and what form it is that that seems like the only information anyone ever needs. But as I was delving deeper into Relphs work such as “On the Identity of Places” from 1976 that all of these things we use to point to places (semiotics), and the way we build or why we build places as a society (Marxian political economy) all hang off of what Relph studies: Phenomenology. More specifically the phenomenon of space.

Through studies Relphs work I found myself standing still in more places wondering about my senses and feelings in the space itself. If I caught myself I would question further; what where the tangible and intangible features, what was the structure of the place, and who was I within it? Though phenomenology and Relphs work fascinates me I have trouble not seeing past what seems to be redundancy. Built environments create different senses of place whether they have physical manifestations in a location or not. Often, we build to chase a sense of place or to create a certain experience (or sense of place). However, what was the initial sense of place that created the first sense of place to create a different one, and from there a denser one? And then when you create an urban environment to give a user a “sense of place” doesn’t that defeat the theory of phenomenology and bring you straight back to the basic societal theory of urban design, except now we choreograph the user’s senses?

The identity of place is a topic that I am really interested about in itself and will continue to research on. The theories behind it seem looping and interconnecting with other extensive and sometimes contradicting theories which I feel will lead to some interesting theoretical analysis of urban designs in the future and influence my very own designs.

~Hanna