Panu Lehtovuori
Professor, Estonian Academy of Arts / Researcher, Helsinki University of Technology, YTK
Weak places as seeds of public urban space
Contemporary urban spaces are increasingly influenced by connections and flows reaching beyond the contiguous urban place or region. In this context, my interest is to explore emerging forms of public urban space. I suggest that to valorise the local articulation of forces deriving from very different scales and contexts, we have to rethink basic concepts, such as place and space.
In this paper, I will address the notion of place. Place is interesting because we tend to think that place and meaning are inseparable. In conventional thought, place would be the meaning-laden part of space. Relational place-theory, however, views place as the moment of signification. This notion I call 'weak place.' Place becomes personal, temporary and changing. The singular place-experience is triggered by a material condition, but it entails feelings, memories and knowledge. As Doreen Massey has formulated, place is open and porous. It offers itself as a possible centre or nexus of the physical, social and mental aspects of space. New forms of public space emerge in the conflicts between different lived place-experiences, collisions of weak places, which may constitute a temporary community. A public urban space is understood to be a specific, time-bound assembly of qualitatively different elements, reaching from local to global.
The aim to involve in the theory the singular element of momentary experience poses an intellectual challenge. An experience - what is 'right now' - cannot be conceptualised, but rather conceptualisation always comes 'after', it is in the past tense. This leads to the seemingly paradoxical situation that the new theory cannot be a conceptualisation of public urban space as something , as an idea, a thing or a collection of properties. Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger and Gianni Vattimo have wrestled with the problem of presenting the non-presentable. They have explored intellectual and literary methods, such as 'dialectical image', 'literary montage' and 'weak thought'. Henri Lefebvre's dialectique de triplicité provides for understanding how the different elements of space, including momentary weak place, perform in the actual production of spaces and events.
The theoretical material of the paper is used to discuss the case of Makasiinit in Helsinki. I claim that Makasiinit was a new kind public urban space, and its fate tells a great deal about the possibilities and dilemmas of experiential urbanism.
Panu Lehtovuori , Dr. (Tech), architect, is leading researcher at the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, Helsinki University of Technology. He is interested in the notion of 'urbanity', new forms of public urban space and planning tools that foster experiential urbanism and creative milieus. His doctoral dissertation Experience and Conflict. The dialectics of the production of public urban space in the light of new event venues in Helsinki 1993-2003 was published in 2005. Lehtovuori coordinates the Helsinki module of POLIS, European MA in Urban Cultures. Currently, he is professor (in charge) of Urban Studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn. Co-founder of Livady Architects, he does creative design work and urban analysis in Finland and Estonia.
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