Amsterdam and its Region as a Layering of Socio-Technical Systems

Amsterdam and its Region as a Layering of Socio-Technical Systems

Read, S.A.
Lopes Gil, J.A.

Architecture

Urbanism

2012-01-03

Space syntax reveals structure in the plans of cities. It misses however an explanation of how this structure arises and what it means. We argue political geographies are structured by the way we have constructed them historically as social organisation, and the means (technique) we have used. These structures depend on a layering of state of the art socio?technical networks constructed at different times in history. These networks internalise their own orders as particular ‘technological rationalities’ which give meaning to the objects subjects and practices they contain. They have also, as an aspect of these rationalities, a strongly normative character, fixing in place geographical entities like neighbourhoods, cities, regions etc. They fix these through the ‘structures of places’ they contain – networks of ‘isotopic’ locations (neighbourhood places; city places; regional places) whose scale and relation with places of other scales is fixed by the network involved and by the part?whole normativities of neighbourhood to city; city to region; etc. relations. This all constitutes a profound level of organisational order, embedded in the real world, that passes under the radar of reductive and ‘theoretical’ thinking. It is not so much pre?conceptual as about the historical and material realm in which geographical concepts and percepts arise. This level of order is what space syntax is in an indirect way finding. It is also a level of order we can use in a far more direct way as a means of modelling our built environment. This paper is an exploratory attempt to reveal the significant elements of this order in the case of Amsterdam, preparatory to modelling them. It begins by reviewing previous work done to show that what space syntax reveals is an effect of the interface of ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘city’ as these were realised technologically in urban infrastructures installed in the industrial era. It goes on to show pre?industrial and post?industrial Amsterdam are forms in their own right and that there are path?dependent processes of transformation between each of these forms. These processes of transformation establish articulations between these different forms, the articulations themselves becoming the vivid centres and the way the different forms (or layers) of the city work together. We conclude that the idea of modelling these human organisational orders embedded in infrastructures so as to reveal the active centres they produce in urban fabric seems plausible.

urban evolution
socio?technical systems
Amsterdam
space syntax
urban models

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:f76a51fa-8692-44ee-9f2f-c44643a757c8

PUC

978-956-345-862-6

Proceedings of the 8th International Space Syntax Symposium, Santiago de Chile, Chile, 3-6 January 2012

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2012 Read, S.A.
Lopes Gil, J.A.