Right to the City (Public post of shame #8)

“Urban life has yet to begin.”

In his satirical essay Right to the City, David Harvey outlines the democratic right of a city and its inhabitants to better impact the urbanization process through collective thought, ideas, and efforts.  Harvey discusses a series of “intellectual operations” that help guide the way to new urbanization.  The first operation is transduction.

Harvey offers transduction as a path to develop theoretical objects that can possibly be conceived from a constant feedback loop between “the conceptual framework used and empirical observations”.  For example, architects and planners may employ a conceptual framework of a park in an urban environment.  Empirical observations and an understanding of stakeholder’s values may lead to the development of a skateboarding park as part of the overall initiative.

Malcolm Blackwell discusses a similar phenomenon in his book “The Tipping Point”.  Here, Blackwell discusses transactive memory, a psychological term proposed by Daniel Wegner, a professor at UVA, in 1985.  In short, Wegner’s proposal offers the idea of collective memory in close-knit groups such as family and friend circles.  For example in a marriage dynamic, one spouse may be able to recall important dates from memory, where the other may have a more visual memory.  The memory of the pair becomes connected and operates collectively to ignore memories that another can provide and to retain those that benefit the holder.

Blackwell explores this concept in the case of divorce, where he proposes that one’s mind is quite literally split in half during a separation explaining many cases of depression and loss among divorcees.  Perhaps this is analogous to the level of relationship an architect or planner has with the urban context and its inhabitants?  Harvey’s theory hinges on an intimate relationship among respective urban residents and builders of the urban environment – architects, planners and other professions.  If we are to be active partners in urbanization, then architects must embed themselves in the transactive memory of a place and time.  Otherwise we are a lonely and silent profession.