Deep landscapes: Constructing urban landscapes for inhabitation

The Flat City space syntax model (Read, 2005), proposes that a structure of the environment is generated in the processes of definition and use of places by people in movement. These processes presuppose a dynamic embedding of subjects in environment, the production of a ‘structure of inhabitation’ of the urban landscape in movement, and a morphogenesis of form as an emergence out of this dynamic embedding. The idea rejects the assumption that a ‘containing’ Cartesian space underpins everyday social existences, the experience of inhabitation, and the emergence of settlement form, and tries to articulate a ‘landscape urbanism of events’ which addresses the issue of urban morphologies and the emergence of settlement patterns over time. The model is partly based on a research into a phenomenological perspective on perception in movement, and a revision of the notion of ‘organism’ as applied to the city (Bateson, 1991; 2000 :Read, 2007). This paper will begin the task of outlining a practical ‘landscape urbanism of events’ by speculatively proposing a notion of the local and of neighborhood design founded in this idea of dynamic inhabitation and its structure in the urban landscape. Instead of understanding the city as an aggregation of bounded neighborhood zones, we use a Heideggerian notion of landscape to see places as being constituted in their relations with other places. These performed relations involve physical movement – and physical movement infrastructures, and their relations with other physical movement infrastructures working at different scales, become the first elements of a construction capable of clearly defining neighborhood space as an apparatus of capture of the global to the local. It restores a notion of center to neighborhood space, and thereby eliminates two problematic spatial characteristics of modern neighborhood space: the border or dead edge, and the flatness in our experience of this space. Areas organized along these lines would offer more opportunities a locally specific and enabling local, for small-scale commerce, and spatial hierarchies and organization reminiscent of traditional urban places. These principles may prove capable of showing a way of designing urban surfaces of fine-grained coinhabitation incorporating synergetic relationships of sociality and commerce. They may restore the possibility of incorporating the traditional benefits of the urban in our neighborhood building