Touching the City
Touching the City is a design research unit that investigates the ways in which we interact with the city, observing the public realm and our relationship with the unremarkable spaces we use and inhabit every day.
As we rush between home and office it is easy to neglect to form a personal relationship with - or an understanding of – the public aspects of the city. We travel to work in a domestic ‘miasma’, which is exchanged for a work-related counterpart on our journey home. Though the city deploys many devices that seek to engage us, these collective and generalised attempts fail to break into our personal space and touch us as individuals.
We are interested in the physical and psychological space of the city, aiming to challenge the urban environment. Our work addresses the question of the free will of the individual in the city and asks what new kinds of relationship we might enjoy with(in) the city. Reflection on the interrelated circumstances that leads to the spontaneity or automaticity of the urban inhabitant led to a search for small sites where people might be observed in a reflective state: these places suggest special potential for the transformation of individual behaviours.
While the Mayor’s 100 Public Spaces - a schedule of sites across London marked for major improvement by the GLA’s former Architecture + Urbanism Unit - are small in comparison with the development in progress for the Olympics or London Thames Gateway initiative, they remain large in comparison with intimate, everyday spaces.
Observing the private life of small public spaces, we consider and exchange views on their potential and make proposals for their transformation. Our first project explores a special, unloved and unresolved realm between public and private space, which we call benchspace.
The unit
Oliver Froome-Lewis and I established Touching the City in 2006 through a shared interest in the potential for dialogue between strategic objectives and personal experience in public space.
Credits
Touching the City is kindly supported by University College for the Creative Arts at Canterbury.
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