GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Benchspace -

Space in the city without these interactive or associational pleasures is distributed widely between urban space and nature space. Space that is left over or waiting to be enlivened by as yet incomplete projects. However, there is a universal solution to such places. A solution tried and tested across Europe. Often accompanied by a waste bin, a tree, and sometimes by a lamppost, benchspace offers modest comfort from which to reflect on the absence of urban and natural pleasures. Certainty of their relative poverty confers on such sites a melancholic stillness.

Comotose Space -

All formal activities in the city are contracted; by ticket, terms of employment, table booking, opera ticket or prior verbal agreement. Even a visit to a city park is a contracted wander in which we know that a specific sequence of action is required; car park, walk, ducks, walk, café, walk, car park. The random, abstract walks of the Situationists and of groups such as Stalker today, could be regarded as a reaction or protest, devised to respond to the lack of meaning, discourse or ownership occurring in public space. A process devised to take back control of minor public spaces by taking action that is individual and alternative yet peaceful. The energetic pursuit of urban amnesias (empty urban sites) and the use of different modes of occupation to create heightened meaning or interpretation in those places of negligible expectation could be viewed as another example of a response to the failure of city planning to grant the individual power in designated public space or, worse, the success of a policy of discouragement.

Nature Space -

Alternatively a space might be successful because of its openness. Particularly if that openness relates to a view or to a natural landscape or park. Places where existing nature has been retained in the city or where new space for nature has been negotiated. Barrier Park in East London is an important example of a new park.

Urban Space -

Public space, urban space, public life. Three terms denoting a certain sphere of activity in the city. Spaces perhaps created initially by the demands of significant buildings which required a view from within – banqueting halls and ballrooms for example – or demand from buildings which required space to be open around them in order to achieve authority through their such as churches and town halls. These might also have required gathering space in order that election speeches could be read from balconies, processions could form prior to ceremonies or crowds could spill out after an internal event. Such spaces became successful sites for markets, perimeter shops and bars, fairs, spontaneous events, rallies and people watching activities due to their proximity to these significant buildings. Buildings which conferred status by association as well as delivering customers, a sense of security and some protection from the elements. These conditions can still be created in similar circumstances today; spaces such as Paternoster Square in London, Place Beaubourg in Paris or Schouwburgplein in Rotterdam.

Vital Space -

Between these two extremes of personal walking experience; purposefully going to work, purposefully proceeding to the theatre or random Stalker type intellectual activity, is a potential for occasional public engagement which offers purpose and experiential exchange. Currently benchspace can be regarded as a low point of urban infrastructure, a necessarily neutral recovery site where exhausted bodies might slump amongst life’s complexities. A more positive role for such sites can be established. Benchspace as a point of engagement, of verbal and physical dialogue initiated by following pathways from which active bodies are engaged in relation to their potential to experience and respond.

Walk Space -

Walking might be initiated by a need for ritual passage, narrative expression, simple transit of ones physical self or a pure aesthetic act. The need for transmission between places, the resulting physical presence - the pathway, and evolution of cultural activity centred on the pathway pre-date architecture and urbanism. When man first came to mark special places with a large stone, a menhir, these places were significant points on pathways – a specialisation or refinement of the pathway or significant points in a narrative played out along the way. Public space might be viewed as a volume above an expanded pathway at a point of interchange or complexity rather than as a space between buildings.