Tag Archives: Philosophy

Essay, On Space, Phenomenology, Philosophy

On Space | The Structural City

On Space | The Structural City
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

The spatial experience of the city is a child’s playground of structures, of a faraway multitude and its near-invariants, a beingness trivial and noble, earthy in its dimensions but astral in meaning. The foreground is composed as the background is configured, imposed by the actions of local actors but emerging on a global stage of meaning and consequence. We are its actors and the playwright, telling the story and bringing it to life for an audience that is ourselves, as if performance could thrive across a mirror of timeless depth and perception, an infinite recursion writ large and whispered softly. The city is a presentation – and representation – of our best and worst selves, of our past and our future, denoting significance in the moment of the present, the here and now of our lives, of the everyday errands of individual importance but (seemingly) societal inconsequentiality. We think, therefore we are but also we move, here we were and will be. These abstract and material constructions of the city reach for the horizon and to the sky, never attaining either but embedding the object with a purpose, with a meaning, and with a question that simultaneously transcends and surrenders to the entities populating the streets, spaces, and buildings of the city. It is transcendence and capitulation to the physical and the spatial, to the kinetic energy of movement and the static inertia of place, to the functioning of the urban object, that at once determines and allows its formation and articulation.

It is an entity that births and devours itself, this Urban Ouroboros, forming protective walls against unseen intruders and unknown dangers. We are the beginning of our story, its past prologue. We are at the center of our story, its extant climax. We are the edge of our story, its future denouement. But it is not the genesis, neither the center nor even the edge that carries the value of our actions. It is the path lying in-between, from where to here to there, from the mere act of marking a path in the landscape to the volatile core of our beingness in the city, and further to the tranquil border that defines the state of being within or without. The grid is the thing. The grid is its genesis, it generates and swathes, offering a translucent skin, which reveals the heart and muscle, pulse and rhythm of the city. Its skin is spelled out in the superordination of geometries both great and small, widths of mysteriously known paths, lengths of promising unspoken journeys, and rigid alignments of mass and light. Hierarchies are simply defined, and structures are mystically revealed in the body of the city; a city of collective memory, of shared purpose, and of forgotten desires that we carry along with us on the path. It is achieved with frightening efficiency, which we consciously retreat from, to our own detriment, yet cannot deny, to our own blessing. The dynamics of the city rise and fall with our intentions, with our mistakes, and with our unending beauty in the body of the collective. Its effects are systematic across and embedded within body and mind, perpetuating the rapid spread of malignancies and their antidote. A city is an object of cosmic imagination grounded in a foundation of our earthly desires and guttural sins. It all these things, and more… much more.

On Space is a regular series of philosophical posts from The Outlaw Urbanist. These short articles (usually about 500 words) are in draft form so ideas, suggestions, thoughts and constructive criticism are welcome.

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Mark David Major, On Space, Phenomenology, Philosophy

On Space | The Phenomena of Space

On Space | The Phenomena of Space
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

The character of space is innately capable of diagnostic exploration. Its mystery only derives from our own inexperience of life, obscuring phenomena otherwise naked to the human eye. Space is simultaneously independent of our actions and dependent on the reaction, Irresistible and immovable is its nature. These characteristics are composed of both semantic qualities of the eye and syntactic quantities of the mind, given purpose in deed and meaning in effect. It can be partially measured in Cartesian terms, partially valued within the constrictive boundaries of a narrow class of types, but only fully contemplated in mathematical scales of size and shape. Only in this manner can we ‘un-hole’ our understanding of space. We must stop digging. We must stop coloring within the lines of mistaken conceptions about space. We must embrace the knowable unknowns; bring the disposition of space closer to our hearts to receive the epiphany that will shake the foundations of the building professions. Space is a material thing, a thing of substance, of quantity and quality that begs for our description, for our understanding, and for our reasoned implementations. We must reduct to deduct but deduction in the absence of product is a shadow, without meaning or substance. It becomes an empty vessel waiting to be filled. If we leave an empty receptacle for the citizenry, detached from the meaning of built space, to connote and denote, then it shall be filled for us, often with dire unintended consequences for our spatial experience. We cannot skate our way to spatial freedom but only walk the path of its responsibilities.

These characteristics are of the mind and the hand, working in concert in the creation and evolution of society. We must become more aware of these consequences, of size and shape, of elongating or compacting, or dispersal or density. Size does matter not only in its measurement but also and mainly in the reaction as a contextual consequence. The line of the street in its horizontal and vertical dimension is worthy of examination as a discrete entity. However, absent of the network, its nature holds the absence of repercussion. It becomes a discordant beat, empty of its counterpoint, to generate a rhythm to the movements of life. We prescribe the false illusion of a static energy that cannot bear the weight of all the potential energy pervading the life force of the city, a place, a dwelling, or a people. We lose the connection between our constructions and ourselves; between each other; between them and us; and, between the invisible entity within which we reside and the Other within all of us. It is only when we liberate ourselves from our preconceptions and misconceptions that a true portrait of our spatial being can emerge from a multitude of brushstrokes. Then the generation and evolution of space will become a knowable known, spoken of in clarity, and not merely unconsciously practiced by rote. The spatial phenomena will be unveiled, unmasked, unhidden from our consciousness and its true beauty can be exalted and celebrated.

On Space is a regular series of philosophical posts from The Outlaw Urbanist. These short articles (usually about 500 words) are in draft form so ideas, suggestions, thoughts and constructive criticism are welcome.

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Mark David Major, On Space, Phenomenology, Philosophy

On Space | The Emergent City

On Space | The Emergent City
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

Urban space possesses both geometric regularity and probabilistic structure. This embeds the space of the city with variables of formal determinism and informal post-destination. The word ‘city’ is insufficient to express its true nature, requiring both prefix and suffix to signify its didactic beingness in the world as a thing. It is heart and soul united in one body, an urban Trinity possessive of the past, present and future. It is a holy act when we build a city. As a living organism, the city does not require legal interpretation but scientific diagnosis. It needs to be understood in terms of the probabilistic object instead of as a container of dogmatic theory. Only then can we forecast and intervene in the object with confidence and purpose. It needs to be studied, more so understood, even engendering an empathic response from the observer of the observed. When we say a city has a spatial layout, we mean it is composed of physical certainties such as buildings and blocks in a plan, and configured of spatial probabilities embedded within the plan of the city (its streets, its square, its parks). One tends to be imposed whilst the other tends to emerge. We can describe these physical certitudes and spatial probabilities in Cartesian dimensions – length, width, and breadth – and even across time. We can also describe them in configurational dimensions: depth, connectedness, and control. What emerges is the ubiquity of centrality and linearity in the urban object, the nature of being in closeness to the other and being is movement towards to/away from the Other. It is everywhere at once, exhibited in the past of the city and speeding the urban object towards its future even as constantly manifested in the present tense: been, being and becoming always.

What is also revealed in this emergence is the importance of magnitude, a multitude of scales at which the space of the city is used, read, and interpreted by all in movement and occupation of the urban object. Size is seemingly an easy thing to understand, having a quantifiable Cartesian measure. However, it is poorly understood, or worse purposefully ignored. The size of thing matters in the blending of streets and blocks, in either compacting or elongating the structure across space and time. It is a key attribute of the city that embeds the object with certain significations, of time or money, of interaction or seclusion, of the wants of Self or the collective being of the whole. We are revealed in the urban object, our wants and desires, our fears and trepidations, our dogmas and ignorance, of our wondrous beauty and horrific ugliness. The nature of the city is human nature. We build, therefore we were. We arrange, therefore are. We intervene, therefore we will be. The tapestry that emerges denotes of the fabric of human life, characterized by lines of communication, meshes of networks, and patches of community. Only then will we discover that we all dwell in the same neighborhood, we are irrevocably connected, and conflict only emerges from the denial of these basic tenets of existence in the city. We are the tenants and we are the landowners. The portrait painted tells the same story: the city and we are One.

On Space is a regular series of philosophical posts from The Outlaw Urbanist. These short articles (usually about 500 words) are in draft form so ideas, suggestions, thoughts and constructive criticism are welcome.

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Mark David Major, On Space, Phenomenology, Philosophy

On Space | Antecedens est Precedent

On Space | Antecedens est Precedent
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

The premise is precedent. Space is not a neutral field against which the societal is randomly played out. Space is more than a mere reflection of independent and discrete socio-economic and cultural variables. It is a living organism, constructed piece-by-piece as a machine for living, seeing, and being that has achieved its own particular form of consciousness, a spark of life more than the sum of its parts and more than the parts contributing to the Corpus Spatium. For too long, knowledge of space has been characterized by apathy, obscurely a superficial reaction against the heroic Modernists but really a deep, substantive fear of constructing knowledge and understanding, of releasing inhibitions that continue to reward failure, keeping food on the table as opposed to providing nutrition for the soul. The hypocrite’s feast is the city’s famine. Knowledge has been stagnant, without evolution, to the point where the vocal heretics now call for revolution. Space is both dependent and independent, a variable mixture of cause, effect, and react that demands our evaluation and our respect. Without so, we diminish the most valuable commodity the city has to offer, in exchange for our empathy it can provide rewards beyond imagining, of happenstance and serendipity, of casual encounter, of formal beginnings, and a lifetime of companions to share the journey with us.

When we view the space of the city as a neutral variable, we devalue the beingness of the city as an object of analysis and curiosity. Our knowledge becomes tainted with a paralysis that is both confiding and liberating, imprisoned within dogma and freed of moral or ethical consequences. The game is played with the chess pieces but the board sets the parameters of the rules. Our cities thus have become lawless, without rules catering to the urban object but in service to the greed of the self. When we view the space of the city as isotropic, we artificially impose uniformity where it does not manifestly exist. We attempt to impose rather than derive meaning from city places. It is a fallacy. We inflate the importance of individual action and deflate the status of collective significance without really comprehending either whilst the kinetic and potential energy of urban space becomes lost in a primordial soup of fashionable theory. Actuality and potentially are ignored at its peril, and we become lost in a uniform monstrosity of development patterns that ‘follow the rules’ but want for a logical existence. When we view the space of the city as mere reflection we judge through a mirror darkly. We assign a value lacking any quantity. We concede quality without calculation. The city more than reflects, it embodies. It consumes and births, it is nurture and nature surely melted, an elegant synthesis of meaning where past and future are simultaneously read and written into a spatial harmony. The space of the city is a systematic thing and we are the blood coursing through the veins of its streets, both sustaining of and existing at its heart. There is a logic to its arrangement and an organization to its reason for being. Space is alive and lives within and without in the city. Antecedens est, est exemplum.

On Space is a regular series of philosophical posts from The Outlaw Urbanist. These short articles (usually about 500 words) are in draft form so ideas, suggestions, thoughts and constructive criticism are welcome.

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Mark David Major, On Space, Phenomenology, Philosophy

On Space | The Geometrical City

On Space | The Geometrical City
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

The geometrical city exists in and across time and space, a quantitative and describable pattern finitely persistent in its stability and infinitely malleable in its qualitative flexibility. The spatial geometry of the city flows, never halting and without beginning, it merges together into an intricate network of limitless possibilities and strategic offerings that guide the weary traveler to his destination. It is a tradition rooted in the instinctive nature of our being, stretching back into shadowy mists of the past and striding forward into the enchanted light of a promised future, bounded by the essential truth of living on a tiny sphere floating, awashed at the edges of a universal shore. The geometric city is the hearth of the community, the fertile land gathers around it, providing both sustenance to and sustaining from the urban ideal. At its center lies a sacred space, a place to gather for all, where insider and outsider mingle and exchange freely of their valued time and goods. This is the true Pilgrims’ pride of America, that which can be independently traced to worlds and cultures of Antiquity from east to west, south to north, following the path we emerged from African jungles to cross plains and rivers, the mountains and oceans. The geometrical city is the economy of the community, goods and services are exchanged in space and carried forth into the larger, unfamiliar world. It welcomes and reassures, it is questions with answers, offering solvable riddles to the observant and the observed.

19th century America represents the urban fruition of a geometrical order, a full expression of the possibilities for street, block, square, and plan in the geometrical city. In the virgin land of this milieu, the geometrical city attains its Renaissance ideal, ultimately a Spanish model of the rational city, relentless in its magnificence as a tapestry, woven by individual hands into a common entity, holistic and worthy of an ancestral past from which it sprouted. Until, at last, radial parts emerge from within or reach forth from center-to-edge to bring a structural wonder to the urban spectacle. The formal and informal, planned and unplanned, coincide in the spatial beauty of the rationally urbane, all shaped within a Jeffersonian framework leaving marks on the landscape to this day. 20th century America demands the ruination of the geometric city in its heedless pursuit of state control and private profit; the faceless bureaucrat and masked capitalist hidden beneath self-serving rubrics, all in the name of an artificial (public and personal) welfare, which taunts the instinctive nature of urban dwelling. Stability is exchanged for unpredictability, the malleable for the rigid, the persistent for the ephemeral, and a natural pattern for the awkwardly contrived forever haunted by an unnatural entropy. It is a doctrine that demands more and more at the expense of less and less (quantity and cost) whilst ignoring the concept of the better and the best (quality). It becomes an irrational anti-city.

On Space is a regular series of philosophical posts from The Outlaw Urbanist. These short articles (usually about 500 words) are in draft form so ideas, suggestions, thoughts and constructive criticism are welcome.

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