Cities alive: Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, and the roots of Urban Renaissance

Abstract

chapter 5 ‘Thrills of Gravity’ which looks at the ‘ilinx’ of the ferris wheel and rollercoaster as precursors to contemporary adventure tourism which reframes ‘high-rise architecture as a playground’ (161), where architecture is complicit in turning ‘the experience of the abyss into a packaged thrill’ (173) consumed as part of the experience economy. Chapter 6 maintains this focus on architectural design, insightfully drawing a line which posits that ‘if weightlessness is a central tenet of modernism, and depthlessness the main attribute of postmodern space, a condition of groundlessness appeared to define the edgy architectural landscape at the dawn of the new millennium’ (198), playful and liberatory but vulnerable to commercial appropriation. In fact this tension between architecture and experience permeates On Balance, and this is addressed directly in the final chapter 7 ‘Architectures of Vertigo’ which takes an in-depth look at the architectural ‘edge’ as a spatial condition, as a signifier of luxury and power, and as a site where the ‘pursuit of intense individual experiences’ (229) are integral to tourist economies ‘reducing the abyss to a themed experience’ (229). Through these accounts of spatial experiences On Balance also makes us aware of the history of vertigo as a story of great loss, as these practices are continually co-opted by neoliberalism or subsumed within the experience economy. I do not hold out hope that I will grow comfortable on the edge of the abyss, balancing on beams or dancing on cornices. Vertigo remains an experience which unexpectedly overwhelms me, and one which, as Deriu puts forward, occurs all the more frequently in spaces which unthinkingly adopt a language of height or transparency in a manner which can be considered ablest and ageist. Vertigo is, as Goethe found, an experience that is ‘troubling’. It is the sensory and bodily experience of estrangement, it untethers certainties and I must bring myself back to a world that no longer seems as solid as it once did. But vertigo can also hold an edifice in a state of suspension, revealing the seemingly intractable and implacable to be precarious and vulnerable to change. It offers the fleeting promise that architectural reality could be subtly but substantially remade, that it might be possible to overturn the weight of entrenched patterns of spatial injustice or at least challenge their foundational assumptions. As this book insightfully concludes, the unsettling experience of vertigo is one that may help us acknowledge our own unstable position enabling us to rethink the ways in which we imagine and inhabit our environments. Vertigo threatens to trouble us, but we cannot deny that there is cause to be troubled.