Soapbox Post

I recently read an article about urban design and the ‘zero-friction society’ that made me think of Phoenix. Why not kill two birds with one stone and reflect on both?

Maarten Hajer – the author of that article – writes about the challenges facing urban design, charting the rise of cities increasingly focused on connectivity, communicativity, and flow. Cities are big, in other words: they spread and sprawl in ways that simply weren’t possible before. And because they are big, they require ‘spaces of flows’ and ‘frictionless speed’ so that their inhabitants can live their lives: “Bringing kids to school and to daycare centers, organizing shopping and getting to work are all combined in daily mobility patterns.” For these complex organizations of movements to work, people need cars and smoothly flowing, efficient highway systems.

So far, so Phoenix. The Valley of the Sun is enormous: 70 miles across and continuing to grow, with much of this – that I’ve seen, and I’ve only really seen a fraction – the classic American suburban pattern of large houses, gardens and roads. It’s criss-crossed by highways and freeways of ten or twelve lanes, which are constantly and anxiously scrutinized by their users because they are never enough, always getting jammed. And the car is the norm: as Hajer suggests, in Phoenix it is virtually impossible to balance shopping, working and living if you don’t have one and aren’t prepared to spend a high percentage of your day on – or waiting for – buses. 

But Hajer goes further than this rather dystopian vision, suggesting that though much of our cities are designed for these smooth, ‘zero-friction’ movements, there is scope for other kinds of interactions. He writes: 

In zero-friction society being modern is being on the move without sacrificing any communicative connectivity. We now design spaces that are meant to help us avoid intermingling with the archetypical other. … Designers work with briefs that are dominated by (functional) considerations of crowd handling, avoidance of congestion, or indeed, zero-friction spaces. This trend in design goes hand in hand with a celebration of movement and speed that replaces the urban agenda of trying to design places for meaningful human interaction.

Zero-friction movements – in which we encounter only our own kind, own opinions, if anything at all – are not inevitable. Hajer suggests that designing against them, and regaining spaces which people from ‘different enclaves’ use, might be aided by considering public sites (from parks to transport systems) in terms of a contrast between public space (which is frictionless) and public domains: “those places in which social interaction across different cultural segments of society indeed takes place”. He cites the example of a Munich underground station which incorporates a glass wall into an art gallery – forcing travelers and gallery-goers to interact – against developments such as gated communities, which provide a sense of shared space while excluding the majority. The one enables new kinds of relationships, however fleeting; the other betrays an essential dishonesty.

To return to Phoenix, I was struck, when reading Hajer’s analysis, by how easily the city could be understood in these terms. Certainly much of its structure and infrastructure can be viewed as frictionless public space: the highways, gated parks and private gardens are all about not having to come into contact with the messy other. But its downtown – and, at the downtown’s heart, the new light rail system – could, I think, be understood as a public domain. This is an old space in the process of being made new, and at this moment at least it brings together people who are different and differing. The families from the suburbs who stroll the streets on First Friday. The bums who raid the garbage bins. The too-cool-for-school art students. The long-time residents who couldn’t afford to move elsewhere. Downtown Phoenix is, in my experience, a messy, ‘sticky’ experience, in which you can be surprised, challenged, confused or uncomfortable: you bump against Hajer’s ‘archetypical other’. (The light rail system is a prime example: not only are users forced into contact with one another in a way that is not possible in personal transport, but it’s a new space, in which the rules are still being learned. New kinds of behaviors are possible in a way that they aren’t, say, on London’s tube.) This means, of course, that it’s not always an easy place to be. But it’s why, I think, at least some people like it.