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To cite this Article Akkerman, Abraham(2009) 'Urban Void and the Deconstruction of Neo-Platonic City-Form', Ethics,
Place & Environment, 12: 2, 205 — 218
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13668790902863416
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13668790902863416
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Ethics, Place and Environment
Vol. 12, No. 2, June 2009, 205–218
ABRAHAM AKKERMAN
Department of Geography, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada
ABSTRACT Urban void sometimes amplifies alienation within urban space, and thus leads the way
to the human craving for authenticity. Juxtaposing urban void with the conventional notion of
urban objects, furthermore, conforms to Nietzsche’s distinction between Dionysian and
Apollonian deportment. The Apollonian is at the founding of the Platonic myth of the Ideal
City and its modern descendant, the myth of the Rational City. Modern urban planning has been
object-directed and, consistent with the historical trend since the Renaissance, has become a
constituent of a Neo-Platonic mythology that insists on forging a city as an urban technological
artifact. Most existing urban parks and squares, as well as suburban gardens, within this
approach, only augment the subordinate standing of urban voids. Yet the significance of urban
void, as the unplanned place that represents the pre-rational, the genuine and the unadulterated,
ought to lead to its re-introduction into city-form as a conduit for self-reflection and authenticity.
Recognizing urban void for its significance may reintroduce an important Dionysian feature into
city-form, leading to deliberate carving of authentic urban spaces.
At every turn K. expected the road to double back to the Castle, and only
because of the expectation did he go on; he was flatly unwilling, tired as he was,
to leave the street, and he was also amazed at the length of the village, which
seemed to have no end; again and again the same little houses, and frost-bound
window-panes and snow and the entire absence of human beings [. . .]. (Kafka,
1919/1992, p. 17)
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Salient in The Castle is the frame of mind associated with urban void of the
streetscape: dread and utter alienation. Void and the perpetual incompleteness in the
streetscape are absurdly entrenched in the meaningless perfection of a completed
built form, within which the only pure realization is alienation itself.
K., the novel’s hero, is a land-surveyor who never attains his goal of reaching the
town’s Castle where the chief bureaucrat resides, just as Kafka himself never
completes his novel. The town, with its streets leading to nowhere, and the Castle,
with its bureaucrats accessible to none, emerge in their entirety as absurd.
Meaninglessness is inherent in the process itself behind the layout of streets and of
the entire town in Kafka’s novel. Once all has been measured and once the town’s
layout has been completed, the land-surveyor, the foremost professional who since
antiquity has measured property lots and laid out new towns, has no reason to stay
in this town. He forever leaves the towns of his residence behind, perpetually having
to move from one territory to another to practice his profession of perfection:
You’ve been taken as Land Surveyor, as you say, but, unfortunately, we have
no need for a Land Surveyor. There wouldn’t be the least use for one here.
The frontiers of our little state are marked out and all officially recorded. So
what should we do with a Land Surveyor? (Kafka, 1919/1992, p. 61)
remain hidden; [yet it] keeps coming to light’ (Armstrong, 2006). Urban decay, seen
as the urban subconscious, is the city’s forgotten side, the other, often
unacknowledged face of the city.
As a landscape of contempt, urban decay is a smudge of delinquency and neglect,
but to Jean-Paul Sartre, it is also the city’s mark of defiance against the enforcement
of rationality and expectedness. Sartre perceives the place of urban decay as a refuge
where authenticity has won over the fraud of urban regimentation, the one place that
does not hide ugliness and disgust, but displays them as pure qualities:
I am on the curb of the Rue Paradis, beside the last lamp-post. The asphalt
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ribbon breaks off sharply. Darkness and mud are on the other side of the street.
I cross the Rue Paradis. I put my right foot in a puddle of water, my sock is
soaked through; my walk begins. [. . .] I am cold, my ears hurt; they must be all
red. But I no longer feel myself; I am won by the purity surrounding me;
nothing is alive, the wind whistles, the straight lines flee in the night.
The Boulevard Noir does not have the indecent look of bourgeois streets,
offering their regrets to the passers-by. No-one has bothered to adorn it: it is
simply the reverse side. [. . .] The town has forgotten it. Sometimes a great mud-
coloured truck thunders across it at top speed. No one even commits any
murders here; want of assassins and victims. [. . .] The Nausea has stayed down
here, in the yellow light. I am happy [. . .]. (Sartre, 1938/1959, pp. 24–26)
It is from within the tension between the turbulence and uncertainty of nature’s
ferocity, and the firmness and security of a human-made shell, that the intellectual
quandary of uniformity amid diversity, and of permanence amid change, arose.
It was Plato who, for the very first time in the history of the West, sought a
conceptual structure within which the question of universality within variety, and
constancy within change, could be addressed. The Platonic Socrates, through the
literary medium of a dramatic dialogue, gives ground to the notion that contingent
objects in the empirical world of daily experience are but flawed exemplars of their
ideal prototypes, the Forms. Even as a theatrical figure, Socrates, a mason’s son,
could hardly be surpassed by any other persona to represent the architectural bond
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[. . .] the dream in which every epoch sees in images the epoch that follows, the
latter appears wedded to elements of ur-history [. . .]. Its experiences, which
have their storage place in the unconscious of the collective, produce, in their
interpenetration with the new, the utopia that has left its trace behind in a
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The origin of the mind–city composite, thus, seems to be traceable to the mutual
relationship between nature’s peril and a thought about, or a mental image of, a
shelter against it. Through antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a model
from clay or a waxen tablet was the physical likeness of such a shelter—a house, or a
walled or otherwise protected settlement. It could have been through the use of clay
and waxen tablets that the Theory of Forms had been forged by Plato. But all the
same, Platonism, too, has left its mark over time on the concepts of architectural or
planning models, and on the very notion of a blueprint.6 To be sure, blueprints or
models have two attributes of Platonic Forms as their own. The one is their static
feature: both Platonic Forms and architectural blueprints are beyond temporal
vacillation; a blueprint does not possess dynamic features, and once changed, is
simply a blueprint different from the original. The second common feature to Forms
and blueprints is their remoteness. Platonic Forms are transcendent; they are beyond
empirical reality even though reality is determined in accordance with them.
As articulated images aimed to specifically design a particular space or object,
blueprints, too, are not part of such a designed space or an object but surely
determine it.
As opposed to a designed space or object, void—as an unstructured niche or a
confined absence of objects—can be launched or established by neither Forms nor
blueprints. This implicit attitude to void in the perceptual–cerebral origin of Platonic
Forms continually projects itself back onto the spatio-temporal composite of
mind–city through the choice of one specific Form: the Ideal City. It is this very
attitude that reflects on the manner in which urban void has been treated, or
mistreated, throughout much of urban history.
The charge that Forms are unable to capture the dynamics of change in empirical
objects (e.g. Fine, 1993, pp. 94–96, 203–224) stems from their attribute as detached,
remote ideals transcending time—a criticism brought up already by Aristotle. This
too alludes to the inability of Platonic Forms to encompass void (cf. Huggett, 1999,
pp. 72–84). Yet in spite of the suggestion that architecture was Plato’s inspiration, if
not a source, the Aristotelian criticism aimed at the Theory of Forms has not
extended onto architecture or urban design (Farness, 1988). Particularly, until the
recent emergence of deconstruction in architecture, epistemology of the architectural
or the design blueprint has not been questioned.
Urban Void and the Deconstruction of Neo-Platonic City-Form 211
or a site undergoes a process of ageing and decay. No blueprint, nor Platonic Form,
can capture this. Platonic Forms, much as blueprints, are the scheme through which
objects or artifacts are cast into reality, but once objects become reality, neither
Forms nor blueprints are capable of addressing changes occurring to them. Change,
void and time are intertwined, not least because they are outside of the realm of
Forms and blueprints.
metropolitan aftermath of the Neo-Platonic Ideal City as ‘an addictive machine from
which there is no escape’ (Koolhaas, 1978, 1999). As both Kafka and Sartre show, in
existentialist quarters of Europe during the twentieth century the city came to be
viewed as an inevitable construct of humans, which guarantees their survival—at the
cost of their gradual loss of authenticity.
It is for the same reason that silence, the temporal analog to void, has faded from
contemporary city-form. Motor transportation, furthermore, has become the
epitome of incoherence, if not outright absurd, in the metropolis. Instead of
facilitating access in the city, transportation itself has come to hamper it. Not only
congestion through urban transportation, however, but also other facets of
malfunction in the contemporary city-form are the inadvertent aftermath of what
had been perceived and presented to be an ideal urban blueprint for the Rational
City.
Urban design has explicitly aimed at predictability in city-form not only in the
twentieth century, but ever since the emergence of Renaissance New Towns. It was
René Descartes’ admiring adage of straight, aligned streets that served him as a
paradigm for his principle of clear and distinct ideas, thus in turn laying also the
ground to modern urban planning (Descartes, 1631/1985, p. 109; Akkerman, 2001).
Striving towards the well-functioning ideal of modern science and technology, and in
the image of a rational city-form, ideal plans throughout the Enlightenment and the
Industrial Revolution have adhered to the principle of predictability in science and
surprise-free city-form in urban planning. Much as algorithms and machines, so also
the modern city was to be launched as an apparatus; but against the blueprint for a
well-functioning city, a malfunctioning city-form has emerged, and in the gap
between the myth of the Rational City and the reality of urban incoherence the
candid observer has detected deception:
Post-modern notions of the city have arisen within this milieu through competing
attempts at optimization, projected upon urban infrastructure, building
Urban Void and the Deconstruction of Neo-Platonic City-Form 213
construction, or individual behavior. Human authenticity has been lost within this
new urban context as city-form emerging from the spiraling need for crowd control
has come to subordinate its makers:
With the entry of Henri IV into Paris in 1495, designed urban squares, on the other
hand, came to be aimed at surveillance, control and the display of might by
occasional military parades. Similarly, streets deliberately carved as conduits of
traffic, ever since the Renaissance, were intended as facilitators of efficiency and
urban clarity. The temporal concern in planned city-form has focused on
minimization of travel time, voids being assessed mainly by their potential as
conduits of traffic. A foundational temporal attribute of void, however, has been
overlooked. The temporal quality that is at the founding of void is silence; its
accompanying mental state often is self-reflection. Planned city-form has accounted
for none of these.
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Urban voids as public gardens in cities appeared for the first time with the Jardin
des Tuileries in Paris, thrown open by the mob in 1792, during the French
Revolution. The introduction of urban parks by Joseph Paxton in the nineteenth
century, in London in particular, came only to emphasize the disappearance of
natural wilderness due to urban growth and expansion.
Urban voids such as public parks and gardens, but also the manicured lawns or
gardens in the back- and front-yards of suburban subdivisions, are idioms of the
Myth of the Garden. Most or all of these voids are public or private expressions of
the craving for spontaneity and authenticity within the contemporary urban
environment, constrained by discipline and control, privacy and exclusion, security
and possession. Suburban yards hardly represent raw nature, much as they scarcely
embody genuine humanism, while natural wilderness in cities can only seldom hide,
and much less revert, the flight into suburbia of the middle-class away from the city’s
ostensibly open public spaces.
On the other side of the spectrum of urban voids, forsaken spaces in cities, as
wastelands and places of danger, have been always ignored, despised, feared and
marked for extinction. In modern urban planning of the late-nineteenth and
twentieth centuries derelict urban spaces were designated for eradication as a matter
of axiomatically presumed public interest. In this regard modern urban planning has
continued to perpetuate the Platonic myth of the Ideal City by clinging to
perfunctory stability and equilibrium, yet ignoring the dynamics of capriciousness
and serendipity. Voids in the city have been reduced to parking lots epitomizing
segregation of pedestrians, to urban parks as places of mutual exclusion of the
middle-class and the underclass, and to street in-fills casting urban voids as
mere gaps.
The question, whether—or if at all—city-form can be responsive to cravings for
human authenticity emanates directly from twentieth century Existentialism.
European Existentialism has been directly nurtured by the increasingly frequent
malfunction, orderlessness and the resulting absurdity of the city. For it is the
malfunctioning city itself, an offspring of the Myth of the Ideal, cum Rational City,
that possesses an unmitigated, authentic Dionysian disposition. The most vivid
locale where this occurs within the city is the place of urban decay.
surfacing from a plan. Yet urban decay never emerges suddenly within city-form.
As the disparaging term suggests accurately, urban decay is a process. It evolves
within city-form as the complement of the urban superconscious: the reality of urban
decay is the counterpart of the Myth of the Ideal City (Akkerman, 2004).
As an opposite of the Ideal City, does urban decay, or urban void, represent the
mythical Garden? The paradigmatic Garden could be seen emerging in the built
environment since antiquity. The Garden of Epicurus was a school set in an Athens
arboretum that had its gates open to women and slaves alike (Strodach, 1963, p. 79).
During the early Roman Empire the Garden Myth was articulated as a conceptual
design scheme in one of three theatrical street scenes of Marcus Vitruvius Polio.
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The Vitruvian satiric street scene (as opposed to his comic and tragic scenes) was a
pastoral setting of people and decrepit dwellings in nature’s wilderness, picturing those
who lived outside cities—the rustic people. Later in the fifteenth century, Sebastiano
Serlio referred to the satiric scene as involving ‘dissolute and devil-may-care lives
[where] the corrupt and criminals were identified’ (Serlio, 1611/1982).
Within the contemporary metropolis, most closely corresponding to the satiric
scene are, precisely, places of urban decay. As disintegrating and hostile, disheveled
and desolate, the place of urban decay in the contemporary western metropolis has
been habitually ignored or—alternatively—marked for elimination. Yet, more than
any other facet of contemporary city-form, urban decay—a manifestation of the gap
between an urban blueprint of the past and its aftermath lingering into a present—
expresses urban time as a flowing continuum, both in its social and its physical
attributes.
The social qualities associated usually with places of urban decay are, much as in
Serlio’s satiric scene, poverty and crime. In the North-American metropolis this
relates often to inner-city areas where gentrification has not yet reached—sometimes
in places where people had lived for generations for lack of means to move to the
suburbs. In the city there could hardly be places more expressive of the passage of
time.
Auspiciously, urban subconscious has been said to be the ‘sum of physical
circumstances [. . .] and historical events, experienced collectively by a group of
people living for several generations in the same environment’ (de Bievre, 1995).
Reflecting upon the physical aspects of urban dysfunction and obliteration, urban
subconscious is also what the photographer Ryuji Miyamoto, in his Architectural
Apocalypse (1986), has called the decay of architecture disintegrating into ruins—
either by way of deliberate destruction, through planned urban growth and
modernization, or as a consequence of a natural disaster.
In contrast to fossilized emblems of past time in a museum piece or a heritage site,
or to the spatialized, solemn Form of the Ideal City, urban decay is the spontaneous,
inadvertent expression of urban change. Within contemporary city-form urban
decay is also an ever-present, ongoing veracity: the unplanned place, or the urban
void, the unintended aftermath of a plan. It is a spontaneous mark of defiance
against the enforcement of rationality and predictability in the city. Stripped of
pretension, the place of urban decay is a niche where city-form as a dynamic,
pre-rational entity wins over a plan. As the polar opposite to the Myth of the Ideal
City, the reality of urban decay gives rise to the re-emergence of the Garden Myth.
216 A. Akkerman
In Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi et al. (1972) had shown the
significance of perceiving the urban Ugly, not as a quality to be judged or rallied
against, but as a process to be experienced and experimented upon. The biggest
challenge to urban design at the turn of the twenty-first century could be the task to
preserve change and to enshrine the passage of urban time. Rather than solely
crafting objects, something of a masculine trait, urban design can accomplish this by
focusing on voids in the city, by enabling people to experience them and to
experiment upon them. There ought to be in the city a designed expression to
recognition, respect and deference of voids and of the passage of time. Preservation
as well as deliberate crafting of urban voids and open places of silence within the city
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Notes
1
Cicero translated only two Platonic dialogues, the Protagoras and the Timaeus, and in the Timaeus
the only sections positively known as having been translated by him are 27d–47b. It is precisely in
these sections that Plato makes reference to a plan or a model (e.g. in Timaeus, 29b, 39e) and
intimates architectonic structure to the universe (Timaeus, 30a–33d, 35–37b). In the Timaeus
(25a–25d) Plato discusses also an ideal-city, the capital of the lost island Atlantis. The very term,
Form, in the presentation of Plato’s doctrine is due to Cicero’s translation, ‘forma’, of the Greek
words ‘idea’ or ‘eidos’ of Plato’s original Greek. The Latin ‘forma’ frequently refers to a
groundplan or a map (such as the extant Forma urbis Romae). Cicero, in his translation of Plato,
carefully follows the urban and architectural context of Plato’s philosophy, adhered to also in later
medieval religious interpretations of Plato (Powell, 1995, pp. 280–281).
2
Extending Plato’s doctrine, Thomas Aquinas, in Question I, Article 1c of his Random Topic
Questions refers to the term ‘Idea’ as consigned to a pattern, a blueprint or a plan, with the
intention to produce an external work (Aquinas, 1983).
3
As a reflection of the human psyche the Ideal City is a shared aspect of the human subconscious.
In terms of Jung’s psychology, Plato’s allegory of the Ideal City is an archetype. It is noteworthy, in
this regard, that with the exception of the Earthmother, Jung enlists anthropomorphic figures,
rather than environmental paradigms. The shared paradigms uncovered by Jung, which he refers to
as myths are: the Mother, the Old-Wise Man, the Child, the Hero, the Trickster, the Animal, God,
and Self. Many, if not all, of the archetypes emerge in folktales and fairytales. His archetype of the
Mother, or the Earthmother, seems to entail the Garden (or Nature), but curiously, neither the
Castle, nor the Citadel or the City, are among his paradigms.
4
Creation of the heavens and the earth, as told in Genesis 1 and 2, has some parallels with early
Greek views on the universe. In the cosmology of Anaxagoras (500–428 BCE) the primordial state
of the world was a confused mixture in a void; the cosmic Mind had discerned the different parts of
the primordial mixture and through rotation arranged them into a coherent world scheme.
5
Jung’s Earthmother, seems to echo Nietzsche’s ‘Primordial Mother’ (die Urmutter). In The Birth of
Tragedy Nietzsche writes: ‘That same nature addresses us through Dionysiac art and its tragic
symbolism, in a voice that rings authentic: ‘‘Be like me, the Original Mother (die Urmutter), who,
constantly creating, finds satisfaction in the turbulent flux of appearances!’’’ (Nitezsche, 1956,
p. 102).
6
The intent here, clearly, is not to the modern blueprint, as a technique developed by William
Herschel only in the nineteenth century. The very notion of a blueprint, as intended here, is a chart
or a diagram for a premeditated spatial configuration of objects. In such a broad sense, ancient or
medieval groundplans and architectural plans, the extant among them being the parchment
groundplan of the Monastery of St. Gall, or plan of the Hagia Sophia Church, correspond to the
notion of a blueprint.
7
The myth of the demiurge was introduced by Plato in the Timaeus (41a). The demiurge is the
cosmoplast, a cosmic designer that mitigates between the static universe of the Forms and the world
of daily experiences. The cosmogonic context of the demiurge had been anticipated by Anaxagoras
Urban Void and the Deconstruction of Neo-Platonic City-Form 217
(c. 500–428 BCE) in his notion of cosmic Mind, and critiqued by Plato in Phaedo (97C–99D).
The demiurge figures in the early version of what came to be known as the Argument from Design
for the existence of God in Cicero’s De natura deorum, ii 34. In Plato’s ideal city the Grand
Designer parallels the philosopher-king, a representative of Plato’s guardian class (Naddaf, 1998,
p. xxxii).
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