Episode as a Unit of Analysis of Movement

Everybody who has read his Gordon Cullen or his Edmund H. Bacon knows that movement has long been recognized as a factor in environmental planning in many ways. For example, in the traditional Japanese promenade garden the importance of movement has always been appreciated. The promenader gains an intense experience of the succession, variation and rhythm of the surrounding scene. The spaces and paths lead him from one stage to another. The spatial structure of the Japanese promenade garden, as well as of traditional Japanese architecture in general, is joined most intensively to time and motion. The environment is in relation to the flow of change in many sense, both concretely and existentially. Taking an example of western urban environment. Here perhaps the most marked sequential spaces are to be found in small medieval, mediterranean towns. Thanks to their organic growth, narrow and winding streets and the emphasis on public squares, most of them provide exciting experiences if the observer is only interested in seeing the townscape from the point of view of movement. There are also examples of this kind of environment in Finland. In old wooden towns like Porvoo and Rauma one can still find varied and rhythmic streetscapes and networks of streets and squares, together with a human scale and an almost timeless atmosphere. One could say that such an opportunity to experience spaces sequentially, or as serial visions, is an important dimension for us, especially as pedestrians. And as Gordon Cullen has shown there is in any urban environment much scope to heighten this experience. For example, by creating a sense of “entering in” some place, “leaving for”, “moving towards”, “turning into”, “walking through” some place or “following on” the flow of spaces. Or, as Edmund H. Bacon has said, the departure point of good town planning should be that the successive towns spaces give rise to a flow of harmonic experiences: present experiences merge with earlier ones and become a step towards a future. Or, again in the words of Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch and John R. Myer: “The experience of a city is basically of a moving view, and this is the view we must understand if we wish to reform the look of our cities”.