The concept of the city and the city without limits 

The idea of the “city without limits” basically questions the meaning of the concept of the city. If the city is without limits, then what can it mean to live an urban life, and what is urban development? Concepts of the city should be delimited; but the city without limits precisely seems to resist such delimitation. 

Already in the late 1960s Manuel Castells criticized the concept of the city in urban sociology. Spatial delimitations were too arbitrary; instead he proposed collective consumption as the scientific object of urban sociology. Not the least because of this move, the city as a delimited spatial-material phenomenon vanished from much research in urban sociology. Only few people took notice of Castells’ proposition that, in regard to spatial-material phenomena, the concept of the city should be replaced with a concept of a “plurality of spatial types”. This, it seems, is precisely what the city without limits consists of.  

The city, or urbanity, does not, however, consist of spatial-material structures only; the city of course also includes humans and their activities. Is it the humans rather than the buildings, the built up areas and the physical environment generally that have become limitless? Should we measure the city without limits primarily by means of the steadily increasing commuting distances, which show that a growing number of people are working outside the municipality or the city they inhabit? Do the dominating commuter-areas after all set the limits to the city without limits? Or does the city without limits reach further out into localities that can be reached only through longer travel? Does, for instance, the city of Aarhus during its festival week suddenly become a very, very long-range city due to a lot of visitors? Does the city without limits even include the migrations in the sense that immigrants still keep their attachments to the places they emigrated from? Or does the city without limits reach into virtual space, into the global networks of communication, where human activity in one place of the earth can have immediate consequences in a place located on the other side of the earth? 

In which way ever limitation is conceived: all the above questions stress that physical and virtual mobility is a central feature of the city without limits. But all people are not equally mobile. Some (are forced to) stay in their spatial types, others move between them. Therefore one can also ask: what happens to the boundaries in the city when the city becomes a city without limits? Does the city fall apart in enclaves, which have nothing to do with each other? Is the city not only segregated, as in the modern, still cohering industrial and welfare city marked by collective consumption, but ‘secessioned’ into enclaves (with gated communities and ghettoes at the extremes), which are not held together by any outer boundary, and thus does not have to relate to each other? 

Such a complex of boundary settings and extensions raises different questions for different disciplines and provokes differing conceptualizations and theorizations with differing purposes. Some present their propositions about the city without limits with a strategic aim in order to make plans or to build, others create new hybrid-concepts like “urban landscape” to establish new frames for understanding cities and landscapes, and still others go for socio-spatial theoretical explanations of the new limitless phenomena.

One of the first common research tasks for the Centre will be to establish an overview over the various theorizations from different disciplines that focus on the above-mentioned questions. Which criteria for urbanity do they employ, what are their main propositions about the city without limits, how do they relate to each other? The task is also to investigate if and how the theorizations and conceptualizations, eventually transformed, can be used as a common conceptual platform for the cross-disciplinary research within the Centre. This is brought about by the projects below in investigations that are oriented towards theory and conceptualization as well as empirical research.  

Sub-project 1: The disciplines of the city and the city without limits

Niels Albertsen, Aarhus School of Architecture 

The overall purpose of this project is to facilitate multi- and interdisciplinary cooperation between the different disciplines of the city, within the Centre for Strategic Urban Research and in urban research generally. Hopefully, the project can assist the mutual understanding among the disciplines as well as the establishment and consolidation of interdisciplinary research competences among the researchers. The underlying idea is that the city is particularly well fit for cross-disciplinary research, and that this is becoming increasingly so with the rise of the city without limits. The city without limits is questioning the boundaries among the disciplines in a new way.  

To accomplish this the project aims at fulfilling three partial goals. Firstly, it will be investigated how the different disciplines have conceptualized and theorized the city with a view to clarifying the similarities and differences between them. Secondly, the character and evolution of the boundaries between the disciplines will be investigated in order to point out the potentialities and barriers to multi- and interdisciplinary cooperation. Thirdly, it will be investigated how the disciplines have approached the city without limits, to see if this has provoked some disintegration of the disciplinary boundaries and created new potentialities for multi- and interdisciplinary cooperation.  

The project is carried through as an investigation of literature with three main foci. The first one is an inquiry into concepts and theories of disciplines and cross-disciplinarities. The background here is theories and histories of science and research. Secondly, the disciplines of the city and their interrelationships as developed and crystallized in the mid-20^th century are investigated. Thirdly, urban literature from the last 20 years is scrutinized to show how the disciplines conceptualize the city without limits and how the mutual relations among the disciplines evolve in this context.

Sub-project 2: Borders of the borderless city

Hans Thor Andersen og Frank Hansen, The Institute of Geography, University of Copenhagen 

The dissolution of the distinct boundaries between cities and their surroundings after world war II as well as the transformations of the urban landscape via globalisation can be understood as a mixture of interacting processes of different time-spatiality; i.e. asynchronous and at different scales. The urban entity has been replaced by a series of overlapping, sometimes connected networks, whose spatial position partly is conditioned by already decided investments into the built environment. 

Despite globalisation and increasing mobility, a good deal of firms and labour is still tied relatively close to localities. Thus, the activity space of everyday life is still contained within the porous and diffuse limits of the urban landscape. But it is important to notice that these activity spaces are dynamic and dependent upon the individuals and their capacity in broad terms (socio-economic, cultural and so on). In the same time is administrative borders cross cutting the urban landscape; such man made lines of division have clear impact on the shape and extension of activity space. 

A new understanding of the urban space is needed in order to understand the creation and integration of various processes and their scales across time and space. The aim of this sub-project is to focus on three different themes: 

·        Tensions

Which kinds of economic, political, cultural, social tensions are generated by the processes of transformation of scale (rescaling) and asynchronous change. Globalisation is generally understood as a primarily economic/ industrial transformation together with (partly) cultural changes. But many other parts of the economy and culture are most closely related to the localities (cities, regions or national states). Such an asynchronous form of globalisation produces social and political tensions whose effects have considerable impact on choice of development strategies, welfare policies etc. 

·        Boundaries in the borderless city

The emergence of a borderless city does not imply that older, existing borders become irrelevant or without function. On the contrary, some of these will gain in importance while others will disappear. The more space the urban landscape is integrating, the more it is extended, the more will hitherto hidden or ignored divisions be active.  

·        Planning strategies

How is it possible to maintain a planning strategy for a territory when its exact extension and qualities are ever changing? What can be controlled and at which scale?  

Sub-project 3: The Post-industrial Urban Prototypes as Strategic Enclaves in the City without Limits

Poul Bæk Pedersen, Aarhus School of Architecture  

The point of departure for this project is the development of specific urbanities in the city without limits. ‘Cities in the city’ which are distinct both in terms of functional, physical and architectonic characteristics. These enclaves are exposed to certain urban strategies that make Post-industrial Urban Prototypes – PUPs. 

The project focuses on the theoretical elements in ‘the City without Limits’, and will through an investigation of theoretical positions in modern theory on the post-industrial urbanity locate the characteristics of the urban enclave. 

The second part of the project will be an investigation of PUPs in the urban landscape.

The PUPs is understood as points of intensities, distinct programs and distinct typologies. They are branded and with infrastructure related specific to the enclave. 

The investigation will concern both their physical and spatial characteristics and their relation to the specific urban strategies in relation to the different PUPs. The key subject here will be the different urban and architectural strategies carried out towards the different PUPs.  

The research will contribute to the documentation of the heterogeneity of contemporary urbanity and at the same time try to describe the kind of homogeneity that the PUPs represent within ‘the City without Limits’. 

Sub-project 4: The city without limits. A multidisciplinary challenge to the concept of the city with an architectural urban perspective

Morten Daugaard, Aarhus School of Architecture 

The main purpose of this project is to throw some light on the status of the concept of the city in a substantial part of the recent architectural and urban discourse. Apart from that it is the purpose of the project to investigate and discuss how the connections between on the one hand the aesthetic, spatial and geographical, technical and infrastructural, economical and organisational categories and on the other the experience and daily life sociological categories have been thought and conceived in a few chosen recent examples.  

The following 3 recent and important publications which all have been presented as exhibitions as well, will be subject to a comparative investigation and discussion: 

1)   Xaveer de Geyter Architects: After-Sprawl - research for the contemporary city. Rotterdam Nai Publishers 2002.

2)   MVRDV: The Regionmaker. RheinRuhrCity. Ostfildern-Ruit, Deutschland. Hatje Cantz Verlag 2002.

3)   Metápolis: HiperCatalunya: Research territories. Actar Barcelona 2003. 

The field of investigation and the methods applied are different in the 3 cases: in AfterSprawl the whole dense European belt of cities from London to Veneto (The Blue Banana) is looked upon with a different gaze than usual focusing both on built and non-built space.

In Regionmaker a regional city gaze is formulated on a limited field consisting of the cities in the Ruhr Area now in a comprehensive transformation process as the old industrial zones are being abandoned.

In Hypercatalunya an urban perspective for a european region a little smaller in area than DK is formulated by use of multidisciplinary approaches concerning Geography, Logistics, Network and Systems, Settlement and Culture. 

The 3 examples are compared to the fundamental work on the urban question executed during more than a decade by OMA/AMO and Rem Koolhaas published through works, texts and exhibitions. The Koolhaas’ state of mind and superior gaze on the urban and architectural development is a kind of fundament for the investigation.

Apart from that the specific analysis of the 3 examples will be executed according to a bunch of chosen parameters i.e. urban criteria, question of scale, mobility, infrastructure, sustainability, conditions of life, identity, narrations, shopping, tourism, the degree of dissolution of traditional dichotomies (town/country, public/private etc.) and the use of concepts of hybridism.

As a supplementary project a small study of the recent competition on a renovation of the les Halles area in Paris. A project which in many ways pinpoints some of the relations between the central city and the near surroundings in one of the old Metropoles and thereby also the urban question.   

The whole project is primarily made as a literary study of the publications in question. 

Subproject 5: City without limits – atlas of a changing territory

Tom Nielsen, Aarhus School of Architecture 

The purpose of this project is to contribute to the discursive and theoretical development of the notion of ‘the city without limits’. This is done by examining the relations between the different concepts and theories related to the notion, and the actual physical changes taking place in an urbanized territory in Denmark.  

The primary question is whether it is possible to perceive changes in the urbanized landscape of eastern Jutland that can be related to the rescaling of the city and the emergence of large new urbanized territories described in the literature regarding current urban development? And if so: what these changes are and why have they occurred? 

The method used in answering this is what could be called an aesthetical mapping.

In this context mapping means a creative process, based on an aestethical (should be understood as related to the idea of ‘what can be perceived’) way of searching for the qualitative aspects of a given situation. This can be done using a whole range of forms of registration and representation. This method is relevant from the disciplinary viewpoint of the architect, who has to deal with the physical consequences of change. But the project is not restricted to this primary level of investigation. There is also an interdisciplinary aspect, as concepts and references from social theory as well as philosophy are included in the analysis of the different phenomena found in the mapped territory.  

The main aim of the project is to test the notion of ’the city without limits’ on a concrete territory, and to produce an ‘atlas’ which  represent the found version of ‘the city without limits’ trough a series of different multifaceted representations. The atlas are expected to give a coherent, but not final or total, idea of what this city looks like, how it works, what elements it consists of and how they are put together. The hope is that such a representation can act as a knowledgebase for the formulation of relevant urban development-strategies.  

Sub-project 6: Planning concepts and paradigms of the regionalised city.

Niels Boje Groth, Centre for Forest, Landscape and Planning, KVL  

The purpose of the project is to examine the extend to which planning practice has changed procedures and concepts to match the regionalisation of cities and in turn to apply the discourse of planning practice in conceptualising the regional city. 

A few observations is taken as point of departure. In general, globalisation makes some urban functions obsolete whereas other urban functions have shown the capacity to adjust to the new international division of labour. The later are becoming dependent on distant logistic, professional and business branch-oriented relations. Formerly they were formed by the local industrial milieu. Thus, cities are facing two kinds of urban restructuring. On the one hand they are turning obsolete urban territories into new ones. One the other hand they are facilitating modernisation of the local business milieu. Empirical research carried out just recently at Forest & Landscape indicates that in order to more fully understand the situation of cities it is convenient to distinguish between cities located in metropolitan hinterlands, cities located in self-sustaining regions and cities located in peripheral regions. Planning processes and paradigms are developed to match these different circumstances. Cities in the metropolitan regions are trying to “suburbanise” and take part in the new event economy whereas cities in self-sustaining regions are focused on sustaining and developing regional clusters and to exploit the options of regional polycentricity. Finally, the peripheral cities are coping with repairing impacts of close downs of business companies and negative migration, however, also some of them are experiencing new options as gateways in international cross-border regions. Embedded in each of these three regional settings new planning processes and paradigms are developing.  

But also new common trends are becoming apparent. First of all, cities and local authorities are becoming initiators rather than just facilitators of development. During formation of the post-war welfare state cities and local authorities took part as the mediators of national development programs. During the current reconstruction of the welfare state the role of the cities and local authorities have changed, first of all because the impacts of reconstruction are occurring specifically in each local settings. Cities, not the state, are the first to experience what happens and to respond. To cope with change and reconstruction cities are paving new paths. More than regulatory planning is needed. Cities take part in developing and the realisation of concrete projects. They establish new public-private partnerships and they often are entering into economic and legally “grey” zones of decision beyond traditional codes of conduct.  

In the regional city the strategic elements of planning is emphasised in order to match the challenges of the outside world. This is revealed by current practice, by the use of SWOT analysis and in Denmark by introduction of “municipal planning strategies” as statutory elements of local spatial planning. Local planning has become more market-oriented. During the period of urban growth, spatial planning responded on demand, for housing, industry and service. During the recent period of urban restructuring planning is focusing upon the supply of new attractive sites and of new urban concepts. Rather than focusing upon functional endowments of urban land, planning is conceptualising urban sites while emphasising historical, cultural, natural and aesthetic values of the city.  

At the regional level new concepts such as polycentricity are considered in order to match the regionalisation of the cities, since when cities no longer are defined vis-á-vis the local hinterland, they search for regional strengths in cooperation with neighbouring cities. Although, polycentricity seems to be an overestimated concept the trend towards forming local urban cooperations is obvious.  

These are a few considerations indicating that regionalisation of the cities are intrinsically related with new concepts and new planning processes. In this project planning concepts will be examined and in the project Development strategies in the regionalised city (Urban policies and strategies, subproject 1), the new planning processes will be examined.  The project is planned to combine studies of literature and case-studies. 

Subproject 7: Territories of Traffic - Questioning Existing Boundaries in Urban Territories

Thomas Juel Clemmensen, Aarhus School of Architecture 

Post-war development of extensive road structures has radically altered the spatial organisation of the city and its relation to the open country-side? Together with a general increase in mobility, this development has generated larger urban territories that challenge the existing conventions of urbanity. Regarding the understanding of road structures in this new condition, it seems that the challenge has for the most part been neglected. Thus the planning of road structures reflects a general lack of understanding for the complex relationship between these structures and the development of larger urban territories. 

Contemporary research on the subject suggests that this problem, to a large extent, can be explained by the continuing domination of Modernist planning ideals and concepts, which tend to view road structures as separate entities and mere objects of engineering. As a result, the full potential of road structures in creating “fit environments for human activities” within urban territories, is either overseen or left unchallenged. 

In order to understand the complexity of road structures in urban territories, it is necessary to develop a new conceptual framework that focuses less on the separate elements themselves, and more on their mutual relations and the urban processes in which they are involved. The research project will approach this set of problems by questioning existing boundaries in urban territories through the concepts of landscape and network. Both concepts are chosen because they, in separate ways, deal with the complexes of connectivity and relatedness. The aim of the research is thus to explore the concepts of landscape and network in relation to road structures in an urban territory chosen as a case study (Herning/Ikast), and by combining these two approaches, to create a new conceptual framework. 

Subproject 8: Urban Field – Landscapes of the City without limits

Rune Christian Bach, Aarhus School of Architecture 

Today, the border between urban and rural is erased in more European countries. The rural landscape is no longer the counterpart of the urban areas, but is a part of a total constellation that consists of city, countryside and the people using them.

It is the project’s aim to illustrate alternative scenarios for this development in a Danish context by empirical studies and by proposing alternative development strategies.

The cases are chosen from a demand of difference regarding the degree and tradition of planning, development of the landscape, identity and the architectonically and landscape potentials. The cases are Randstad in Holland and Vlaamse Diamant in Belgium. Where Randstad represents the regulated and controlled development of a distributed city, Vlaamse Diamant represents a development of uncontrolled sprawl. Compared to the Danish context and tradition, the two regions represent very different directions of development for the urban-rural relation and strategies for a future development of it. 

With the empirical studies as background, a series of scenarios illustrating future development of the Danish landscape is generated. Besides the three cases, contemporary landscape-architectural and urban planning projects are used as empirical and conceptual reference.

The developed strategies give examples on how the city without limits can be developed in a Danish context. 

The contribution of the singular projects to the main project 

As shown in the above descriptions, the sub-projects are formulated as independent projects with their own goals and logics. The projects taken as a whole are thus not restlessly subsumed under the superior project on the concept of the city. However, they all contribute to the main project at different levels and from various perspectives and approaches. Looking at their contribution from three different angles; scale, problem and disciplinary approach, can show the connection between the sub-projects and the main project in more detail:  

Scale

The question of scale comes up in two ways: firstly as a difference between various levels of analysis. Different knowledge about the city without limits is gained by locating the analysis at different levels of scale. Secondly, the question of scale comes up as a question regarding the changes of scales (rescaling) that take place in the city without limits. From the viewpoint of the first aspect the projects are distributed in the following way:  

Subproject 8: Urban Field – Landscapes of the City without limits investigates the city without limits with a point of departure in a national scale, and makes its contribution to the understanding of a new concept of the city through comparative studies of urban development within the frames of 3 different nations. Included here is also a regional scale concerned with “the urban” as located in a tension field between or around big urban centres.  

The regional scale also defines the level of analysis in Sub-project 4: The city without limits. A multidisciplinary challenge to the concept of the city with an architectural urban perspective and Sub-project 5: City without limits – atlas of a changing territory. Further, the urban region is the main geographical frame for the investigations in Sub-project 6: Planning concepts and paradigms of the regionalised city, which, however takes its point of departure in the scale of the city and urban politics.  

Subproject 7: Territories of Traffic - Questioning Existing Boundaries in Urban Territories, operates with three cohering levels of scale in the empirical investigations: a regional scale, an urban scale and a local scale, the latter being defined by the perceptible context of the singular infrastructural equipment.  

Finally Sub-project 3: The Post-industrial Urban Prototypes as Strategic Enclaves in the City without Limits covers what might be called the scale of the urban enclave, which is considered to be highly important in studying cities without limits. 

The second aspect, i.e. the rescaling and the tensions that happen in the city without limits are the central concern of Sub-project 2: Borders of the borderless city. The project is based on the idea, that the city without limits basically should be understood as part of a process of rescaling, including an asynchronous development of central spaces of experience and action.  

Problems

Sub-project 4: The city without limits. A multidisciplinary challenge to the concept of the city with an architectural urban perspective is discursively oriented and works directly with the conceptualisation of the city without limits as a regional urban system by investigating the content of concepts with such a reference. Directly related to the same problem of regional urban systems, including increased mobility, but with an empirical intent, is the Sub-project 5: City without limits – atlas of a changing territory, which is testing the concept of the city without limits through a concrete investigation of the changes taking place within an Danish urban region.  

Subproject 8: Urban Field – Landscapes of the City without limits takes its point of departure in the question of the borderline between city and country. This problem of the borderline is treated more broadly in Sub-project 2: Borders of the borderless city. It is also implicit in Sub-project 3: The Post-industrial Urban Prototypes as Strategic Enclaves in the City without Limits which focus on the “enclavisation” and the delimited urban project. Related to the investigation of such concentrated urban projects are also the investigations in Sub-project 6: Planning concepts and paradigms of the regionalised city into how planning as part of the dispersal of the urban system and the division of labour at greater levels of scale, has become strategically oriented.  

Subproject 7: Territories of Traffic - Questioning Existing Boundaries in Urban Territories makes its contribution to the main project with a study focussed on the question of mobility, and which also, with a point of departure in infrastructure, makes a contribution to understanding the border between city and country as well as between the professions, which by planning the infrastructure have contributed significantly the structural development of the city.  

Disciplinary approaches

The approach from the discipline of planning is covered by Sub-project 6: Planning concepts and paradigms of the regionalised city and by Subproject 8: Urban Field – Landscapes of the City without limits. The approach form the discipline of geography is represented by Sub-project 2: Borders of the borderless city. Both sub-project 3, 4, 5 and 7 take their departure from the discipline of architecture, but in different ways. Sub-project 3: The Post-industrial Urban Prototypes as Strategic Enclaves in the City without Limits investigates physical differentiation primarily by scrutinizing the architectural and planning content of the enclaves. Sub-project 4: The city without limits. A multidisciplinary challenge to the concept of the city with an architectural urban perspective is working with the architectural project as the frame of reference and thus with a special focus on conceptualizations springing from strategic and action oriented concerns. Sub-project 5: City without limits – atlas of a changing territory is aesthetically oriented and takes its point of departure in the perceptible physical changes of the territory. Subproject 7: Territories of Traffic - Questioning Existing Boundaries in Urban Territories is also founded on an aesthetical architectural approach, but is primarily interested in the structural level.  

Sub-project 1: The disciplines of the city and the city without limits is a metaproject which in the context of the main project which compares the different ways different disciplines pose their problems in regard to the city and the city without limits. Building on the idea that the city without limits implies an increasing migration of concepts between the disciplines and that the borders of the disciplines in this way tendentially are weakened, the project endeavours to specify the features that characterize of the various disciplines as well as the possibilities and limitations of interdisciplinary cooperation between the disciplines that have the city without limit as the object of research.