letnik 10, št. 2/99 Alenka FIKFAK The changing role of the master plan Planning theory, architectural design or more? The city offers to a passer-by a different image, than to one who indulges in it. Similarly a city, when first visited, has a different nature, than when we leave it and never return. „In the city of Sofronia, one half is constant and the other half temporary, when its time of stay is over, they pull out the nails, unscrew the bolts, demolish it and take it away, to be transplanted to a barren space of another half city ...; the city of Moriana with its glowing facade and its other aspect, hidden face:... from both sides it seems, that the city continues into the perspective and replicates its list of images: while in reality it has no thickness, it only has a back and a front, like a piece of paper with one image on one side and another on the other, that can never be divided from one another or look at each other ..." „... on the map of Smaragdina all the paths, solid and liquid, public and hidden, should be marked out with different coloured ink. It is much harder to draw on a map the paths of swallows, that cut the air above the roofs, descend along unseen parabolas with wings folded, swallowing a mosquito in flight, flying in a vertical spiral up to a tower, from each point of their air paths they are superincumbent to every point in the city." (Calvino, I.: Invisible Cities, Castle of inter-twinned destinies) 1. Introduction The present time is a time of dramatic clianges in ttie field of urban development. Traditional urbanistic patterns, built on the concept of hierarchy have become unmanageable. The crisis of „professional identity", that is not limited only to architecture and urbanism, is a result of a decrepit aspect to life, based on statistical images of hierarchic relations in space and the society. Concentration is not a criterion of urbanity, moreover urban integration is realised by utilising new communication technologies, allowing dislocation of formerly physically connected activities in space. Because of our persistency on using models of former urbanistic theories and practices processes that lead to „chaos" in urban structures appear to be only a consequence of our present professional weakness and not a fundamental change in the system. Therefore we often try to forcefully enclose them in traditional urbanistic patterns and control them with elements of „classical-hierarchic" spatial order. In reality these processes are a new phenomenology, whose matrix has to be sought for in the crisis of former models, formerly influential and still repeating themselves with their single-layered simplicity, incapable of interpreting contemporary structures. Spatial structures are no longer static, they are in constant change and motion. The central point in space is the human/individual. The Intertwinement of motion, speed and use strengthen dispersion, an answer to negative forces of massing, concentration, closed and static space, changing social, economic, political changes. However, models whether centric, linear, single-layered, multi-layered etc., that generate compact forms, are not the answer to modern human desires. Even the newly designed spatial, still „urban pattern", as is the historical sediment, is/will be layered and ambiguous and will not exclude transitory structures. It will become a necessary component of numerous partial composition strokes, enabling experiencing particular areas through various spatial layers. New spatial structures and possibilities for their perception through different layers surpass the limited, stable concept of urban sub-division into particular functional and social, administrative entities. Reshaping urbanity will be directed into complementing existing high and poor quality urban structures by addition of „urbanity" or structures with complex programmes. Within the framework of these changes the main role will be played by rules described as different and unique, temporary and unfinished and constant openness to new influences for urban changes. Within these changes (European) town centres will maintain their roles of mental and cultural town centres: „CORE=CONCENTRATION of QUALITY and ACTIVITY". The focus of future professional urbanism tends towards dealing with „in-between", still inarticulate and unused, urban spaces. On the global level the general principle will be continuity, so that on the detailed, real level, when dealing with fragments (spontaneous elements), space for discontinuity will be opened, emerging between: dense and rare, closed and transitory, built and open, central and peripheral, respecting the position and particularities of morphological units, under influence of social and economic activities in the city region and globally that don't have physical and administrative territorial boundaries - limits. We will embrace the design of complex structures, into virtual „chaos", where mechanisms of dynamic activity, flexibility and diversity are hidden, representing the mosaic of different activities and intensities on different levels of spatial organisation. It will be a new dynamic urban structure, devoid of stabile, physically expressed centres. 2. Information society = dispersion or new concentration The word information is used in day to day communication. Similar to other words used in such a context, it has no exact meaning. It describes the transmission or reception of data or explanation. It also implies data and explanation, intended for the transfer, as well as facts, news, findings and data obtained from research or experiments ... The paradox of „information" is hidden in the duality of meaning: a large part of the information about the intent of a text in the „Slovenian" is already the cognition that the text is coherent and expressed in the Slovenian languäge. Therefore a text is not necessarily information as such. (Jamnik, R., 1974) Centricity is experiencing an inverted system, a shift and tendency for establishing new centres. From the former nodal inclination a network system is emerging. Moreover this process of changing hierarchy is characterised by fragmentation, dissolution of centric systems and the emer- gence of new systems on a different level of perception. From one centre an indefinite number of centric nodes are being developed. Physical de-centralisation contains the rules of the new system(s). The World is becoming more complex and virtually illegible, incoherent. The individual should be the centre empowered with operating on any level of a city, whereby the meaning of the idea of centrality is „new order and new possibilities for perceiving and understanding spatial messages". Changes occuring in contemporary society include in the transformation events in the whole space, on a „dispersed territory", that isn't limited by national boundaries. Dispersity hides the style of living of modern man. The relation of „dispersity" between the new social and dwelling way of life is expressed in the conjunction of „horizontal flows", spread across an area and introducing different content and certain „vertical flows", connected to history and the physical aspects of each particular place. New urban structures are a product of these spontaneous processes. The greatest changes have happened/are happening on the periphery The new periphery is a „periphery of emptiness". It can be described as a space that is unpermeable. Outside the city it is a dispersed space, in a certain sense resembling the remainder of a periphery. „Outside" in what sense: is it still sensible to determine „limits" and envision a „city gate"? The end of the old idea of modernity doesn't exclude the search for new modernity, similarly the end of rationality doesn't exclude new rationality. The repeated search of parts, their particular character, demands search for a new complex hypothesis for the existing traditional city for the emerging dispersed city. The city is a dynamic, complex organism, changing in time, through evolution that is not prone to linear principles. The most dynamic element of cities is circulation, acting as a mechanism of exchange and not limited to transport alone, but also creating it as a constantly changing network of social interaction: moving centricity, that is simultaneously vertical and horizontal, and differing in function, speed and modes of use, The system of different speeds already exists in cities and modifies both our perception and spatial uses of the particular space. After the construction of the tunnel under the English Channel, the city of London became much closer to the city of Lille, than its own periphery: a new mobility of the urban society. This means that any inhabitant can apply his own spatial-time network to a city and it becomes an urban spatial construction experiencing constant changes, understood by the individual as his own private information. 3. Architecture - urbanism? The new condition retracts all values from the former. The condition developed through history, identity, continuity and stability The condition that In the past offered unity, although conflicting, of different Interests in large urbanistic concepts - visions. The consequence is retraction from all scientific methods, de-legitimisation of phases of cognition, understanding, evaluation and Intervention benefiting poor models of rationality, leading to two different urbanistic cultures In the 80's. Hiding behind descriptions and analysis, as the first direction, was an excuse for finite planning. The other direction again discovered the centrality of an architectural project related to particular fragments and recognised the plan as a transitory condition. The urbanist was in the latter case only an interpreter of fragments, the poetics of places. Berlin The most important event affecting both the economy and social events in Berlin, as well as the spatial transformation, was the „fallen wall" and with it the division into the East and West, „not because of the idea of union, but the newly established order and possibility for interaction, following the hypothesis that great variety is still an indication of a kind of collective reunion". V. Gregotti clearly described annoyance and problems that emerged from lack of a „complex idea about the cities" transformation and development after the wall fell, with reference to events that occurred sixty years ago. Therefore, to the times of Martin Wagner, the cities Stadtburat between 1926-32, animated by experimental realism, allowing interventions in a flexible fashion on different sites in the city with a clearly defined internationalist unitary policy. Such nostalgia and repeated quest for a necessary concept are very important, because fragmentedness and dispersion were some kind of a leit-motiv of the IBA experience in Berlin in the eighties. We can say that it was an unique opportunity in the sense that architecture as a fragment was relieved of all ties to urbanism. The reasons why this experiment had no deeper or complex reflection in the relation ar-chitecture-urbanism are numerous, however they can all be summarised into the urban condition of the city at the time, „A half city, a place without a centre and context, heterotopy, cIty/non-city, surrounded city without a context" - a gigantic laboratory of ideas, that was incapable of reconstructing the city as a complex organism. It was the ideal place to indulge in the luxury of not dealing with problems put forward by physical, functional and symbolic factors of a normal city, where one can nourish the illusion, that the „state of cultural shock can be cured by changing the language". On the level of rules that should establish order during the reconstruction of a city, they didn't take into account the historical status of property with technical division and possibility for typo-morphological reinterpretation. The new rules were in contradiction with the old morphological structure, continuity of facades in a traditional idea about streets, with no reference to the relation stroke-site-construction. The way of work also influenced the fact, that the projects oscillating between „urban simulation, built incrementally and a typological collage". On the level of an architectural design these are motives that led to „monumental modernism, stylistic decorativism and self-referential experiments", that happened and is still repeated, even after the wall fell. For some, this is the end of great stories, „a universe of fragments" without the necessity for forecasting or visions about complex design in recomposing the whole. London The so called Enterprise zones from 1980, a newly established instrument in economic relations and urban transformation, had immense influence on the planning process, especially in the battle against the decline of industrial cities. The instrument included public participation in the economic field, while simultaneously clearly rejected the plan - urban concept, as envisaged in the traditional sense. By establishing this instrument the „democratic form of governing in the metropolis" was revoked, i.e. by removing the Greater London Council, founded in 1965, that served as an indispensable element of connecting physical and social structures in the city. The most important example is the „establishment of the new" in the London dock-lands. From the economic and visual aspect, the chosen method of solving urban economy in crisis, was somewhat of a „Columbus" egg': exploitation of a development possibility in a certain area was given away, an area where there were no defined planning guidelines or urban plans. The financial market defined the „vision-image" of the place, as well as the quantity, method of development and utility They experimented with liberal rules of the game in the fieid of construction investment, contradictory to over-defined planning. An urban policy as „site-de-sign" lacking a global urban vision, showed a tendency for emphasising the fragmentation process. The problems between architecture and urbanism are no lesser. The confusing collection of buildings and things, that had thus emerged, isn't an expression of poor architecture, but above all the loss of urban rules in city building, i.e. in the relation street - plot subdivision, as well as typological, morphological and hierarchic criteria in development: the only rules that can ensure pluralism of styles, the existence of a certain architectural language - very varied, but also connected with a common societal will concerning the historical context. Architecture is more than trading with real-estate, where more or less individua! actors prevail or as the London dock-lands showed, a „development frape" was achieved, composed of pieces strewn on a chess board with an unpredictable stroke. During the construction they wondered „who will live in these houses, who will work in these office buildings?" Permitting the construction of 66 million of space without orientation guidelines, without any regulation stemming from demand, a supply from planning: all of this is „scandalous" not only for urbanists, but also for the same real-estate dealers. On this example even they wondered about the crisis of new development, aware of the fact that maybe beautiful architecture is not enough. Paris In the 80's the French capital presented two confronting initiatives: on one side the initiative by the president of France - Mitterand, and urban changes on the other, led by the mayor of the city - Chirac. The existing dynamics between the two poles is much more complex, than seen at first sight, that cannot be simply reduced to the relation between policies of fragmentation and of global vision, between a project and a plan. The two however in certain cases show common actions, that were within the diffuse re-qualification capable of establishing some positive vision for their realisation. Such an example is the mayors initiative from 1983 for a uniform programme for the Eastern part of the city, connecting two existing important sites (Park La Villette and the fVlinistry of finance) with a myri- ad of plural interventions within the re-qualification plan for one of the most degraded parts of the city. The new method, respect for renewal in the project methodology Zac presented, with reference to the Italian tradition in research on relations between urban morphology and construction typology „street, closed unit, plot and the idea of their existence in history and the physical envelope of the city, represent the new basis on which to build the ville sed-imentaire: the city that grows by itself and constantly adapts to temporary heritage". Thus new project criteria were born, that changed the meaning of order in the case of intervention in the periphery: on one side „revival of volumetrics, that adapts to the characteristics of the urban context, respect for rules of the existing envelope, urban re-scaling to the dimensions of the street, protection and improvements to certain elements in the antique ambiance", and „repairing, modifying, identifying centres, demolishing limits, searching for geography, renewed design of the countryside" on the other, ... as was offered by the programme Banlieus '89. While in Italy there were unproductive discussions about the contrast plan-project, P-aris was undeniably influencing the course of events with its renovation of urban policy, that wouldn't diminish the rich heritage and experience: negotiation about renewal of its regulation plan and the urban project, as well as architectural qualities according to rules of the existing structures and new plans for the wider area. A value, that proves the central role of public administration in the distribution of processes of planning, as well as the finality of particular creations and the quality of architectural projects as such. All of these operations and changes took place in connection to the „idea of new centrality" and in the framework of international competition in the sense of building a new city by integrating the old. Proof is in the unique character of the city Barcelona The birth of the first local administrations after the fall of the dictatorship in 1979 marked the direction of urban policies in Spain. In Barcelona they decided to use the old plan as a referential framework for a series of new projects in urban renewal. The main representatives were Bohigas and Basquets. The most important turn was the decision from 1986 that Barcelona would organise the Summer Olympics in 1992. The regional government established the Corporation metropolitana, operating in contrast to the municipality. From this moment on unitary planning on the general level was made impossible, a series of sectorial institutions emerged. City planning was divided into two levels: the first concerning specific interventions in particular parts of the city, level of special plans, while the other focused on defining the big plan, with a tendency for individualised strategy for balancing between fragmentary parts. In this sense the decision stated by Oriol Bohigas is interesting: he emphasised the difficulties of managing dynamic flows on the wider level of the city structure. It was followed by a directive to benefit architectural projects, dealt with as vehicles for redesigning and building the city. According to Bohigas, the general instrument-plan has a „longer life span", while contemporary cities are built by many particular projects. „The plan has to be flexible, it has to be maintained only as a repository of clear concepts. The city is thus a union of Joint fragments, that have to be dealt with differently, their transformation begins with redesign of their public spaces". The core of such understanding is in the identification of elements, that'are capable of defining criteria for designing spatial form in a big city: - in the specific intervention of particular parts, e.g. interventions in Eixample (Cerda), expansion in the 19'f century in the sense of regular division with individualised relations on two different levels: one in the sense of preservation, the other with more freedom in the sense of redesign, with emphasis on specific regulation of courtyards in particular blocks; - with the definition of the big city plan, the search for new balance between particular fragmentary parts and the city as a complex; the first place in the strategy was taken by the operations in areas de una nueva centralitat, a series of uftan spaces, dispersed throughout the city, especially the first periphery, where initiatives should concentrate on functional evaluation, that can adopt the central monocentrism of the historical core; Amongst the new zones included in the „new centraiity" were four zones prepared for the Olympic games in 1992: Torre Melina, Montjuic, Villa Olimpica, Val d'Hebron. The Villa Olimpica area offers a radically different connotation in a part of the cities strategy The condition of the new city was best shown by critic V. Montalban, when he commented on the demolition prior to the development of the Olympic settlement: „In all these things there is Just one alibi - Olympic games. It appears as if one part of the city won in a lottery, while the other, constantly getting poorer, didn't". The project New Icaria for the Olympic settlement included tensions that were going on in professional circles at the time: still the question of context of new and continuity/discontinuity in relation to new historical strokes and certain denied edges, such as the coastline. The settlement operation is not only the erection of residential buildings; it is also the complexity of infrastructure, that should improve problems in the inner city: building of collectors, re-systemisation of the railroad by removing two existing barriers, protection of the coastline, building part of the port and system of green spaces, all of which define the urban backbone of the area. The system of open spaces even today represents a structural element, a shape and relation to urban quality, aligned with the growing meaning of „urban voids". An experience whose most important and original framework is represented by building, redesign and changes, that are accurate and dispersed and concerning public spaces as an opportunity for thinking about the new idea of city. tions of an open market economy the described type of planning doesn't work. Planning has to introduce more flexible forms of negotiated urbanism. With the new city plan we wish to surpass present mechanistic and static forms of establishing land use and replace them with more flexible, innovative forms of negotiating public and private interests, thus assuring constant public control on development in the city, even if unexpected new needs for new investment appear This is political activity, that assures the presence of public interest even in private or partial development in the urban space. In the implementation of a city plans directives, we have to assure new types of participation of public funds in private investment, thus maintaining public influence in investments in the city and investments, directed into achieving the cities' strategic spatial goals. WHAT SHOULD THE CITY PLAN ENABLE IN THESE NEW CONDITIONS? The city plan has to enable the execution of two types of development: - strategic development, for which we have to formulate quick and efficient instruments, thus bringing the projects to a quick start, including the investment programme; - administration development, for which a normative regime would suffice, represented by a set of rules with which we can easily adapt projects to the basic guidelines in the city plan or strategic structural plan (long term plan), with the city plan we present stabile, stronger normative spatial and design guidelines for stabile urban areas, while dynamic development areas with less consistency can be managed with spatial planning conditions, a much more flexible instrument for achieving goals of the city plan. The City plan is therefore an urbanistic instrument, used for negotiating contextual and technical elements of spatial policies and lays the role of intermediate between strategic structural plans (long-term municipal plans) and development plans. 4. The city plan Today radically different contents and understanding are hidden under the term „city plan", than twenty years ago; a plan as a „vision" of a narrow professional working group, a planned „finite and static image" of desired states, that should be achieved by urban policies. Today under condi- 5. The project, rules and the physical environment Defining the rules of conduct in variety, whose basis will be in human demands and interaction with the environment, will be the basis for a new normative strategy of division and control in space. Corresponding to the rising attention given to the existing, there is a feeling of liberated creativity, that fills the new design culture: new control strategy and neiv technology for new types of land use, in the sense of found „disperse harmony between man and nature". Thoughts about the idea and role of the project. The relation between the rule and the project is a topic of ongoing debate for quite some time. The most important issue, that is simultaneously the starting point for transforming instruments is.- what are the criteria for description and what are the physical and functional „rules", that direct maintain/ change different structures. The essential criteria for new ways of conduct are the following: - loss of finite character and static spatial structures, that were a consequence of the schematic and limited belief. that everything and for all times can be defined. From here also stems the ever growing importance of the time factor, v/ith increased inclusion of the historical - development dimension; - planning wavers between preservation and changing when enabling numerous differing solutions; - knowledge of a territory becomes an interna! activity of the project, influencing the momentary decision making and simultaneously allowing future interpretation of solutions of another direction; New terms in the comprehensiveness of physical and functional spatial structures, with new concepts and models, point out problems in dealing with a plan on the higher level; e.g. what are the limits of a set urbanistic norm that apply to the dimension of the wider territory and when are levels for particular buildings established, that are the topic of an architectural project, Criss-crossing different spatial layers, with a constant connection between structure, typology and morphology with construction and technical characters, assures the diminishment of sequential rigidity in urbanistic instruments. It also prevents division and variation between levels of operation. Normative elements of the plan suggest the enrichment of traditional criteria of typological and morphological descriptions with other descriptions of a constructive or structural type. Only in this way can we enable the input of real complexity, that doesn't recognise itself as simplification. Ways of conduct, testing and objectivity. By understanding the historical in change (dynamic development), the desire for different ways of conduct in defining rules and planning techniques, based in traditional roles of total knowledge, stability and sectorial orientation, grows. By research of spatial specifics the changing characters and their possible combinations, different processes, stratification and possible changes are becoming clearer. Simultaneously the tendency for dispersed dealing with particular examples is becoming more dangerous. On the other hand, the demand for understanding the complexity in variety of functional, symbolic and dimensional elements, emphasise the incapability of limiting with one-sided, homogeneous norms of a restrictive nature. This new, quickly changing spatial condition strengthens the idea about what is necessary: „Recognition of the incapability of static dictate of rules and a shift to defining possible rules and limits between the poles of regulation, by norms and ensuring necessary flexibility in the relation to particularity of contextual content. " The traditional manner of proscribing, the right way/the wrong way is loosing in significance. Value wili be given to differently devised instruments, that can be summarised in the following points: • The first type includes recommendations or ways of conduct, containing directives for the process of recognition, evaluation, execution and implementation of a plan. • The second category are solution suggestions {objective type), a sort of open system, that includes all spatial and technological elements (in view of the level of the plan). • Finally, an instrument, done as a list of measures and demands, that includes the European experience. Contrary to schematic classifications, connections and flexibility between particular instruments, are gaining in value, with a tendency for particularisation of edge conditions. Introduction of new instruments into the framework of establishing rules can be dangerous. The most exposed dangers are possible loss of complexity and richness of different cultures and interpretations of spatial elements: variety of modern space is a result of various influences, that are on one side exposed to criticism while assuring the desired complexity on the other (an example of denying instruments of typological analysis). We are living in a time when debate of rules and norms doesn't allow complete project freedom. Nevertheless there is no true freedom in design, if issues of spatial changes are not clearly established: - as a counterpoint to objective rigidity, flexible testing; - as a counterpoint to a single possible solution, the search for variety; - and as a series of rules of conduct in the sense of stimulating expressive freedom of each individual. Therefore division into urbanist plans and architectural projects, that are in fact unitary and connecting factors in managing physical space, do not guarantee ultimative descriptions of real complexity, since the latter emerges from integration, co-operation and response on the process level of comprehensive management. In this way the normative - project solution gains legal basis, that gives priority to land division, organisation of roads and public space, as well as the integration of typological, morphological and functional demands, by conceding to the activity of time and initiatives by particular authors a necessary level of interpretative freedom. 6. The „new hierarchy": knowledge, decision making and action Necessity of knowledge We have definitely tackled inability and senselessness in „complete knowledge", envisioned as a way of controlling every aspect of even the smallest entities. The method was utilised till exhaustion, changing it into a kind of statistical data, noting every spatial point and feature , their possible changes ... and above ail extracting limitations, that in the finale consequence often resemble an analysis, rather than a plan. The monumentality of previous analyses presented themselves in inefficiency, rapid ageing of data, connected to prolonged production of plans and their adoption. Today knowledge on physical structural features has value in new forms: longevity of the physical compared to the short life span of social and economic processes. This is the reason for different ways of structuring and understanding space, expressed by experiments with new descriptions and classification. Numerous concepts have been devised, all seeking „proper methods and approaches" for understanding and evaluating space and later design of elements for directing processes, seen as structural re-design: organics and hierarchy of levels of built forms; continuity and sub-division of plots; distribution of space by respecting rules of development from the start, as well as the specifics of structural change and territorial limits, typological and morphological character of the envelope and open spaces ... All of these elements find the letnik 10, št. 2/99 new approach for recognising ttie physical as an obstacle, altlnough thiey are not directed into uniform evaluation. They all have in common the necessity for measurability and description of complex phenomena through time. In such understanding, massive information aparatus are senseless and have no function. Much more important is selective information, quickly accessible and capable of summarising the present spatial condition, a decisive aspect for establishing spatial management by devising different phases in the planning process, related to possibilities for development and transformation of the physical structure. Complexity Complexity in the element of l