February 01, 2003
Moving from one place to another is a daily activity, and it largely determines the way we experience our environment. And more important than the distance covered in this way, is the time spanned. Time is our yardstick for drawing up a mental map of the city. This notion of time is so important that there appears to be a ‘law for the preservation of travel time’: worldwide people spend 1.1 hours a day in transit, both in developing countries and the Western world. As soon as faster travel is available it is immediately translated into traversing ever greater distances. The time spent remains a constant factor; a balance that is continually reestablished.
Time is nonetheless a relative term: what and how much you experience in any particular period largely determines ‘how long you experience a space of time’. The ‘tempo’ is defined as the personal experience of the expended time. The ‘tempo of the city’ starts with the subjective interpretation of travel time and the potential relocation options based on that travel time. This mobile use of the city is directly related to the way the traffic system is organized. In turn, the present system and its prospective plans will influence the future use of the city. To a certain extent this is at loggerheads with the (current) spatial and programmatic coherence of the city and therefore also with its urban development. ‘How to tailor urban planning specifically to the tempo of the city?’ is a vital question that is currently being researched.1
To travel is to sojourn, not just because movement spawns experiences and impressions, but also because you can use the time to do other things. The electronic age – now an integral part of urban traffic – has opened up the possibility of parallel experiences. The range of options has been dramatically increased. It’s not just a matter of the shortest connection between A and B, but also of the type of journey you want to make. Travel time is activity. The journey is arranged on the basis of the desired use of time, combined with the possibilities available in the chosen mode of transport. And it’s a real ‘metropolitan boon’ if there’s a variety of travel options to one’s destination. Frequency of public transport, transfer facilities, a well-interlinked car, bicycle and public-transport network – all contribute to the multifaceted ‘urban experience’.
Our perception of travel time is influenced by four factors: speed, reliability, comfort and pleasure. In this the traffic system plays a pivotal role, alongside the possibilities offered by the interior of the chosen mode of transport. In a study of a certain section of Rotterdam’s urban network, several different routes – all pretty much the same in terms of time, but offering different levels of reliability, comfort and pleasure – were compared. The traffic system on this model route proved to be ‘multimodal’: it provided a variety of transport options, as well as the prospect of changing one’s mode of travel in transit. Each route provided a different way of traversing the city and, therefore, also engendered a different urban perception and experience. Naturally this doesn’t apply exclusively to this particular route, but it’s representative in light of the policy currently being implemented in Rotterdam.
The Rotterdam Spatial Plan (municipal policy up to 2010) is based on seven centres around which accessibility must be regulated.2 The scheme not only recognizes the city’s present multi-centric functioning but also adopts it as the basis for future planning. The municipality aims to make the entire Rotterdam region accessible by public transport in 45 minutes, calculated from at least one of the seven urban nodes. The result of this is reflected in the planned public-transport routes intended to link the different centres, without having to take in Rotterdam’s Central Station. In effect, public transport would do what the car now does: follow a less hierarchical network. If it works, Central Station may well have to be renamed.
A city thus configured by traffic-flows, connections and intersections, rather than by formal, hierarchical, spatial structures, is a network city. Now that functional and formal structures converge less and less, it’s debatable whether the legibility of the city on the move has anything whatever to do with spatial cohesion. Time regulates the use of the network city, which is based on the possibilities presented by the infrastructural network. Does the ‘tempo of the city’ constitute a different basis for its spatial planning?
An immediate answer is that the network city can indeed be legible, but that its continuity does not necessarily correspond to the city’s formal structure. The functional infrastructure is continuous, but the programmatic and spatial continuity fluctuates dramatically and is even absent in many places. This is in contrast to the nineteenth-century closed cityscape that is still the urban reference for many people. In this type of city there was a unity between the structures that were important for spatial organization, functional access and programme. A prime example is the network of Parisian boulevards that underpinned the spatial planning of the entire city. In present-day cities these three functions are generally no longer united.3
Hence the important role played by the metro today in helping us to experience the fragmented city as a unity. The larger the city, the more important this system is for the use of the city, but also for our perception of it. Many metropolises can now only be understood via the metro map and the logic offered by the metro system. The time that is attached to this organizes the city in a way that makes it comprehensible. Sometimes the rudiments of a formal structure can still be detected, but usually only on a lower, more local, level. The bigger picture is missing and, moreover, can no longer be found in a geographic image.
If the city is depicted as organized according to time scale, the result is a so-called tempographic map. Rather than being a geographically accurate depiction, this map shows the time it takes to travel through, to, from and/or within an urban system. A tempographically transformed city tells us something about its usage: it reveals a city that presents itself as a system of interconnected urban places.
The cultural significance, however, goes further than a more rapidly accessible environment; it’s a matter of being able to choose our own personal city from the different urban places on offer, in combination with the various forms of transport available. Zap-mode is no longer confined to switching between dozens of television channels, but spills over into life outside the home. We all put together our own city, according to the available transport options. The tempo of the city is a personal film which, as in the cinema, is shot through with flashbacks and side lines. The linking thread is formed by the physical infrastructure, which offers an optimum mix of speed, reliability, comfort and pleasure.
All this has an effect on the city’s spatial planning. And the impact is probably greater on the car than on public transport, because the road network is inevitably more confronted with the city’s formal structure, a structure that is frequently no longer geared to increasingly intensive car use. Fast routes take the line of least resistance, irrespective of spatial logic. A road system need only be unequivocal in its signposting: the alternatives must be clear when and if it is necessary to choose a different route. A certain logic of movement is, of course, vital; retracing one’s route is an unacceptable form of proceeding. Interlinking is also paramount. ‘Routing’ is increasingly being taken over by GPS aids, spawning a rash of new usage options for the capsule-on-wheels, such as interactive route planning based on real-time travel information. As a consequence, the motorist is becoming more and more of a passenger in his own car. Ease of use goes hand-in-hand with a less hierarchical and more flexible network. As with the developments in the public-transport system described earlier, the focus is no longer on a single centre serving as a trap for all traffic.
Future urban planning will focus increasingly on maximizing the options offered by the traffic system. In this context, urban planning and traffic control are interrelated disciplines that provide the choreography for the city’s circulatory dance. That requires a different attitude towards movement, one that is alert to opportunities for optimizing usage and for broadening the infrastructure’s public significance.
Programmatic flexibility is a key to multiple spatial usage. Instead of physically stacking or extending, the physical structure can encompass different usage at different times without taking up any more space. Such a design would entail the organization of a time schedule for the existing infrastructure: a kind of choreographed flow. That in turn would require the layout of the road profile to be rethought: for instance, changing the direction of the traffic-flow during the morning and evening rush-hours (suggesting that tramlines should no longer be placed in the centre of the road). Traffic flows can be influenced by increasing or decreasing traffic-calming devices.
The traffic system can also acquire a multiple significance by investing the infrastructure with the quality of social space. Parking solutions, for example, could serve as more than just garage spaces, they could also be urban destinations, places where people meet and relax, or just simply a spot with a stunning view. Rotterdam still lacks a real multi-storey car park in which the combined presence of hundreds of motorists would provide an unprecedented vertical light-show.
Of course, developments of this nature are applicable to both traditional city centres and the more peripheral areas that have long since attained the status of urban locations.
Florian Boer is an architect and founder of -scape
1. This essay is based on the study ‘TM.RPT.2002’ carried out by -scape and commissioned by the Rotterdam Department for Urban Planning, Housing and Traffic (dS+V). An extended version will appear in Transit, mobility, city culture and
urban development in Rotterdam by Paul Meurs and Marc Verheijen (eds), NAi Publishers, Rotterdam. Contributing to the -scape study were: Pier Helder, Diego Barajas, Jan Jongert and Florian Boer.
2. The seven Public Transport nodes cited in the Rotterdam policy are: Alexander, Kralingse Zoom, Parkstad (near the Kuip), Zuidplein, Schieveste (Schiedam centre), Noordrand and Central Station.
3. The fragmented experience of contemporary Paris was already noted 50 years ago in Guy Debord’s situationist project The Naked City. See: Mark Wigley, Constants New Babylon. The Hyper-Architecture of Desire, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam 1998.