Interview with Sophia Psarra by Sunaina Shah

Interview with Dr. Sophia Psarra

By Sunaina Shah AA History and Critical Thinking

Dr. Sophia Psarra is Reader of Architecture and Spatial Design and Director of MSc in Spatial Design Architecture Cities at the Bartlett, UCL. She is also the editor of the Journal of Space Syntax.

Her research interests are in the area of conceptual and perceptual spatial characteristics and their relationship with patterns of movement, use and cultural content. On May 7th 2015, Sophia gave a talk titled ‘Redefining Architectural Agency’ as a part of the HCT Debates at the AA School of Architecture. This interview is based on the talk, where she discussed the issues of authorship in architecture and in cities. She addressed the dichotomy between authored view associated with architecture and an authorless view associated with the evolution of cities. She studied these ideas of multiple authorship in the city of Venice and discussed some of her findings.

I would like to start off with something you mentioned in your presentation. You said that, “when we analyse and criticise, our intention is to explain the real processes that make cities”.

Would you say that our mind and our cognitive process are like cities in some way – organic and networked and hence self-organising? Where and how does the notion of a designer being in control fit in, considering the self-organisation of the mind and the city?

Authorship is quite a complex subject, isn't it? In the work that I do, I try to understand the relationship between different kinds of authorships a little better. First by defining different kinds of authorship, and then by understanding how they interact and how they relate. The more I work with this subject, the more I understand what it is about. Intuitively, I was interested in Venice because it is an interesting place and because of how it excites people’s imagination. I was interested in Calvino, who put Venice at the core of his book Invisible Cities. The more I began to read into things, the more I began to understand that the order in the city of Venice was about different kinds of authorship. I saw that there was creative and collective authorship, both working together to create the city as a whole. The city was collectively produced into the form that exists, by the creativity of many people. But at the same time, there were individuals and groups that read certain patterns and then either reproduced them and embedded them back into the city, or they produced something new which was inspired by the city. So when we talk about how a city develops as a process, it is about how at some point people read patterns and collectively reproduce them. They extend the streets or the canals and connect them to the squares because they understand that it is an essential factor. Gradually, global patterns emerge out of the actions occurring at a local level. So this is the way in which the individual mind interacts with the collective mind.

When we talk about architects as authors, we consider them as directing their energies towards producing something new, towards innovating. They get inspired out of patterns they read, like the people that contribute to the way in which cities

develop, and they transform and extend them. So in a way, the hospital in Venice by Le Corbusier is an example of inspiration that came from the city of Venice. Of course the building has design ideas that we can see in other works by him, and so it is not like only Venice led to the design. But in a way, he joins all the small clusters of square areas with pathways to formulate something which looks like or resembles the urban system. Of course, there are other influences as well that come into the design, for example the architects and the urbanists of the time were closely involved with ideas about evolutionary systems and designs which are organic, and so on. We all know that the 50s and the 60s were about that, and that was the time when the hospital was produced. So in a way, even at that point you see different kinds of authorship coming together, not just the city and the mind of the architect, but also all the other networks of people and ideas that were circulating at that time. Having said that, I wouldn't go into how the mind works because that is something that neuroscientists explore.

Yes, true. When I asked about the mind, I was thinking about, and in a way referring to what you were just talking about - multiple authorships. Our thoughts are interconnected and there are traces of many different things in what we produce. So when we produce something, one can unpack the traces of other people, of other things and of a certain chain of thought. I was thinking about how that is systemic and organic and how cities are similar in this sense. In between the two scales of the thought process and the city, lies the author.

Yes, true. I think that even though we tend more towards a systemic understanding of things, we still have to try to place the individual into that system. This is what the work I do is about. And the analysis that I use looks at a system of relationships, how one thing relates to another and how the two relate to a third element. This is what produces a relational logic in a system. So what happens though, during the Renaissance, is that we have architects like Alberti who want to revolutionise the definition of the architect. They want to establish a new discourse. So he promotes the idea of the architect as the single author who is intellectually oriented, who speaks very well, who is very well read, and who interacts with various patrons who are also intellectuals in the society. And this sets architecture apart from the processes that create the city. It is a very intentional act to create that split. What I am trying to do is to put the two back together and understand them better.

That is very interesting and it brings me to my next question. If we are to look at the selforganising digital systems of the recent years, there seems to be no space for an author. So, in the digital systems of design, would you say that the long established role of the architect is changing?

I am not sure if it changes. There are people like Mario Carpo for example, that claim that it is changing, but perhaps I would need more concrete evidence to say that it is.

Also, I am sure that things are changing differently in different countries and in different cultures. So it is hard to make a statement which is generalising. Of course there are different ways by which people produce, but when they collaborate digitally they establish multiple networks of collaboration and authorship. I believe that in the

digital collaboration, all the different kinds of authorship are in operation. I think that the idea of the individual author is still strong, and even when they collaborate, I am sure that all the people who write code together are very careful regarding safe guarding what is theirs, and how they interact with others. And so, I would not really say it is changing. If I say it is changing, it would be big enough to publish in a journal and say, “look the role of the architect is changing!� I think we need to study this carefully to understand it.

My next question is about authorship in certain cities. You spoke about Venice developing with multiple authorship and how in its case, at certain a point in time, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. At that point, attention was always to the city as a whole, no matter how interesting the small things were. So I was thinking about the role of an overall governing authorship today. What are your views on how some cities in countries like India and China are developing where one observes a rapid, uncontrollable and fragmented growth, and which seem to create enclaves?

This is a very interesting question and we definitely need to think about these things.

The reason for which one studies the past is to understand what is happening today better. Of course we cannot make direct comparisons, but when cities are growing overnight, like Masdar City, I think that the offices that design cities of this kind claim that they are smart and that in some way or another, they respond to evolutionary patterns and so on. I would have to really look at them closely to get a better understanding.

I had a student who looked at four capital cities and then examined them at a time when they started. These were Washington, Brasilia, Astana, and Abuja, and then she looked at them today because the cities grew and they developed in an unplanned way, in a non-designed way. So it is a really interesting study because it observes the shifts and the changes. For example in Brasilia (a number of my colleagues have done this study in different ways), the main axis was supposed to take residential buildings, but gradually the distribution of retail shifted along the axis since it was better connected in the system of the city as a whole. So the people of the city, in a similar way as in Venice, started understanding that the places that work for retail are not those that were intended for it initially. This happened by looking at where the shops were being located and where they worked better. So the city adjusted the changes. It is interesting to see things like that. In Washington, the monumental core stayed monumental core and the retail shifted somewhere else. With the expansion of Washington, like in some other American cities, you get the big arteries leading outside becoming the strips where the shops are located. And so there is always this interesting interplay between designed objects and emerging or evolutionary ways of looking at a city. I think an interesting text to read is the Generic City by Rem Koolhaas if you are interested in that. He describes the cities in Asia, primarily the ones that are always the same wherever you are, you cannot distinguish one part from another. Even the airport looks like a city! He describes this in an incredibly interesting way.

Cities are fascinating, aren't they? One could study the Russian cities, the cities that were produced under the communist regime because they had a very top down planning, and the ways in which they evolve now with capitalism and neoliberalism being the modus operandi. What kind of challenges do these cities face? The kind of fabric that was designed for a socialist city consisted of huge blocks and public transportation, and so how does it now accommodate the need of commercial activity to be central?

My next question is coming from this issue of an archipelago where small Venetian islands came together to create a single whole. Using space syntax analysis you were able to study the networks and the nodes and things in a very quantifiable way. In the digital system we see physical enclaves that do not connect to their immediate surroundings in order to connect somewhere far away. In a way I am referring to the classic phone-paradigm where you are disconnected with the immediate environment to connect to someone in a completely different environment, who is also not connected to their own environment. They are both in a digital space. So my question is that, do these kind of connections have some spatial and territorial agencies that can be studied to see how connected or disconnected we are?

Yes, this is a very interesting question. There are some colleagues of mine that explore that interaction between the physical space with their network interconnectivities and the digital space of applications, social media, google maps, location devices and such. So although some people are comfortable with the idea that we haven't got an advanced understanding of it, we have a PhD student [at the Bartlett] who deals with bloggers in an area in East London. He is looking at the tweets and trying to do the network study of these tweets. He is then overlaying them on the physical network. Another student of mine is analysing libraries and looking at clusters of people – the way in which people distribute themselves inside the spaces and then what kind of inter-visibility relations exist between these clusters. He is looking at how these relationships support the developments of an informal spatial culture in a building, where there are strong control mechanisms, because libraries try to discipline the body and control the interactions in a Foucault-ian way. So he is super imposing social network of connections amongst people that interact, onto connections that are established by space. So there are people doing studies of this sort.

Bill Hillier has a lecture series, he is interested in what he calls the ‘myth of historic spatiality’, where the myth is that in the past people were connected through space, and that in contemporary society, through arguments promoted by Castells and others, networks have replaced the connectivity that the physical space was providing. He says this a myth because even in the ancient societies, there were lots of societies that were operating across distance. From anthropological studies, archaeological studies, and so on, it is seen that people travelled distances and their society depended on relationships that were built across space. Sometimes these relationships are rituals, ceremonies, processions, that were strongly symbolic, formalised, and ruled events. They were more or less similar to a membership in a group on Facebook. So the membership of the chieftains for example, in a particular

territory was something conceptual. It did not depend on relationships of neighbourhood and proximity. It was something that they carried in their heads and relied on rules, and it was enacted through these kinds of rituals and processions. So there were always virtual and trans-spatial kind of links and relationships. His lectures are fascinating. If you want to know more about this, you can read the Social Logic of Space which he wrote with Julienne Hanson that in the 80s. In that they looked at anthropological records back to certain archaic proto cities, like some of the cities of Mesopotamia, in order to understand the kind of logic those societies had, to see whether there was virtuality. They say, in the book, that there was always a kind of trans-spatial and conceptually virtual relationships in societies. According to them, we have two kinds of solidarities – one is spatial, so we relate to each other because space brings us together; and the other is trans-spatial, which is by membership in a class. The ancient societies had both systems. So the digital devices today might actually accentuate and help us work through membership in terms of how we relate to each other. But physical space is still important and that is why people rush to cities, because of the concentration of skills, of job opportunities, and that you can do so many more things in less time, less effort and so on. I don't know if that answers your question, but it is a more theoretical answer rather than a quantifiable answer because we are still researching, we are still looking.

My last question is a bit more personal, because it is something I have been thinking about and in some way addressing in my MA thesis. In your talk you mentioned Calvino's idea of imagination as an electronic machine, as a computer. What are your views on this analogy considering that in your work you rely on technology quite a lot? What are your views on the relationship between imagination and technology?

I think there is a very good chapter in the book ‘The Literature Machine’, called Cybernetics and Ghosts. Calvino explores the reason for which the imagination cannot be a machine. Of course he uses the mind being a machine analogy more as a metaphor. So what distinguishes the machine that produces many combinations from the human machine? I am trying to remember how he defines it and I can't remember the argument he makes, but it is really interesting. He begins by saying that in the ancient times, people were story tellers. People told stories and the listeners would gather around the story teller. The story teller would use certain kind of stories that were about combinations of specific themes and patterns that were more or less standard. He then moves onto the ways in which combinations can be considered and the contribution of technology. I think it is that, because I read it sometime ago. In my view, there is a lot of discussion on this, and there are people that push forward with artificial intelligence and the idea that computers will be intelligent and they can learn and produce better systems. I think there is a very strong interaction between the human mind and what machine provides, and it is like with the city again. It is the same in that neither the one nor the other can be considered separate. Obviously with artificial intelligence I think that there is a moment where they say that the machine will exit the human mind and that is the dangerous bit. I think it is a difficult philosophical subject.

When we use these software systems, and these mathematical ideas that enable us to understand very complex artefacts like cities, it depends on what one is looking for and how one frames their research question. It is about how one uses it as a tool. So, it is not that it is going to give the same answer to everyone that uses it, but it is empowering. It is fantastic to be able to understand things by the use of tools. In my case it was great to see that the position of all the islands of Venice is such that it shows collective production. Everybody cared in the islands for establishing the best possible position for themselves as well. So it is empowering. But there are so many stages of technology, and philosophically it goes into other kinds of questions.

Practically, it is incredible what it allows us to do.

I find what you just said very interesting, because you almost spoke of it in a way that it was an extension of your own self, so you are doing the task, but it is like you hand is extended and it can do more.

Yes, but it is important to look at it without preconceived ideas. We should not try to make it do what we think should happen. Sometimes, we have intuitions and it confirms the intuition, other times it can completely knock you down, and that is the most interesting thing I think. You discover that in contrast to common intuition and common sense, something different is happening.