Environment and Planning A advance online publication
DOI:10.1068/a39208
Experiencing visualities in designed urban environments: learning from Milton Keynes Monica Degen
School of Social Sciences and Law, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, England; e-mail:
[email protected]
Caitlin DeSilvey, Gillian Rose
Geography Discipline, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, England; e-mail:
[email protected],
[email protected] Received 19 June 2006; in revised form 13 November 2006; published online 17 August 2007
Abstract. In many discussions of how cities in the global North are changing, the growing importance of urban design is emphasised: that is, the production of visually and spatially coherent urban buildings and spaces seems to be increasingly central to urban change. To date, most attention has focused on exploring the reasons for this shift. Much less attention has been paid to the experiences of the people inhabiting and using such designed spaces. Although many authors acknowledge that, in theory, such encounters between human subjects and designed urban environments are richly various and unpredictable, few studies have examined this empirically and learnt theoretically from these encounters. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in the British city of Milton Keynesöthe centre of which is a shopping mall, a designed environment par excellenceöthe authors argue that understanding experiences of contemporary urban change requires a relational and performative understanding of environmental encounters, and they suggest three intertwined implications for rethinking research on urban aesthetics: first, a multimodal and sensuously embedded understanding of vision; second, a practicecentred understanding of the environment; and third, a need for self-reflexive understanding of the researchers' position in the fieldwork.
Introduction Milton Keynes is a town of around 207 000 people in the south of England. In some ways it is an extraordinary urban development. Designed in the late 1960s to occupy 22 000 acres of Buckinghamshire countryside, Milton Keynes is England's largest new town and its fastest growing urban area (Clapson, 2004)önow slated to gain 70 000 more households under the government's Sustainable Communities Plan (ODPM, 2003; Young, 2006). The centre of Milton Keynes, and the focus of this paper, isö famouslyöa shopping mall. Opened in 1979, the architectural roots of the mall are complex and lie as much with a notion of an `undercover street' as they do with the classic North American mall; its architect prefers to call it a `shopping building' (Walker, 1994). Nearly thirty years on, the mall now resonates with a number of significant trends in the urban environments of the global North. In particular, it might be seen as exemplary of the `totally designed environments' which Boyer (1988, page 54) claimed were becoming ``the normal background for our mode of consumption in the post-industrial city''. The increasing importance of `totally designed environments' finds an echo in the rising significance that the notion of `urban design' has in contemporary cities. Moughtin (1999, page ix) defines urban design as ``the design and structuring of public space in cities'', which involves both planners and architects (often in collaboration with developers) in designing urban buildings and spaces which coordinate visually and spatially. In the UK context, urban design codes have become more and more popular as a means of giving urban developments a coordinated `look' and coherent structure (Carmona and Magalhaes, 2006; Carmona et al, 2002; Madanipour, 2006).
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Dovey and Stevens (2004, page 354) suggest that there is even a ``global urban design formula'' shaping the redevelopment of many city centres in the North. In this shift towards urban design, however, with very few exceptions, there is one outstanding absence: the experiences of the people actually using these `designed environments'. Few discussions of urban design appear interested in how people engage with these highly designed environments, or how these environments are experienced in the routines of everyday life. This is the central concern of this paper which, based on a pilot research project conducted in spring 2005, uses Milton Keynes as a point of departure to explore the experiencing of such places. To introduce what motivated our reformulations, we begin by offering our own account of the central urban space of Milton Keynes. We continue by reviewing briefly how people's encounters with such environments have been conceptualised in much urban theory. We then move on to propose a relational and performative notion of that encounter, and end by exploring three key components of a research practice that might be better equipped to acknowledge the complexity of engagements between people and designed environments: firstly, a more complex understanding of visuality; secondly, a focus on practice; and, thirdly, a certain reflexivity. Milton Keynes: city centre/shopping centre The new town of Milton Keynes was designed in the 1960s as a gridded series of estates linked by roundabout-hinged roads, with a park and a vast undercover shopping centre at its centre. Milton Keynes was a grand utopian experiment, a city created to adhere strictly to urban planning and design principles and, in so doing, provide all the elements of modern convenience and comfort to its citizens. One of the most potent signs of its modernity was its shopping centre. This is not an out-of-town mall (as is often the case in North America): instead, located at the heart of the new city, the mall is the city centre of Milton Keynes. (Its displacement of the traditional city-centre form with a privatised `public' space is another way in which Milton Keynes has been exemplary of wider urban trends). The original part of the mall is a modernist glass and steel box, officially opened by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and rebranded as `the centre:mk' in 2000. An extension, which opened in 2001, is a softened version of the same style. At the time of construction, the Milton Keynes shopping centre was the largest covered mall in Europe; it is now the seventh-biggest mall in the UK. In the 1970s the centre's design was seen as architectural innovation, an attempt to redeem the shopping-mall form through a self-consciously modernist aesthetic composed of ``cool lines, gridded rationalism and pure rectilinear forms'' (Jewell, 2001, page 322), and it is still defended as such (Taylor, 1997). The original building had no closing doors: its entry points were integrated with the surrounding street layout (Mosscrop, 1994). Serried rows of shopfronts stretch along the white-tiled, atriumstyled corridors that link the indoor and outdoor public spaces. Public art works were integrated tightly into the original conception of the space (figure 1), intended to elevate Milton Keynes's brand-new citizenry by exposure to high culture (MKDC, 1990). A commitment to design remains a hallmark of the city (Rose, 2004). Milton Keynes City Council has employed the Thomas Heatherwick Design Studio to oversee the planned expansion and redevelopment of the city centre, with the condition that they retain the gridded street layout and the design of the existing street furniture: the black, rectilinear shelters, for example, that frame each pedestrian crossing in the city centre (Haslam, 2001). Like so many modernist buildings, however, Milton Keynes mall has been described as an architectural failure. Architecture critic Jewell argues that the elevated architectural aesthetic clashes with ``a layout typified by hedonistic consumption''
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Figure 1. A corridor in the original section of the MK shopping centre, where a sculpture by Liliane Ljin (Circle of Light, 1980) hangs from the ceiling photo, Gillian Rose).
(2001, page 322). The result, he claims, is ``dull monotony and sterility'' (page 322). He is not alone in this estimation. Bryson got lost looking for the shopping mall because in Milton Keynes, ``all the buildings looked like they might be shopping malls'' (1995, page 179). When he finally arrived, he found the mall to be ``dark and determinedly unlovely''ö``like being in the world's largest bus station'' (page 179). Critics of Milton Keynes city centre often remark on its clinical layout and its harsh modernist contours. Observer Aronovitch was more generous, and öwe would suggestömore perceptive. He commented on the crowded sociality of the mall, and the contrast between the uninhabited outside and the bright, noisy chaos of the interior: ``Socially the mall seemed to play almost exactly the same role as did the Great Hall of a Saxon earl a thousand years before. Here were light and entertainment and company. This was the only place to be, if you didn't want to sit, alone in your wattle-and-daub hut and contemplate the cow-dung fire, or watch daytime telly. This was market, feasting, entertainment, all the attributes of the lord's dwelling place rolled into one.'' (2001, page 67) Our research in Milton Keynes centre found a place that has much more in common with Aronovitch's latter-day great hall than Bryson's bus station. The classification of the mall as an aesthetic failure bears little, if at all, on the everyday
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practices and sociabilities that animate it. The mall is hugely popular, visited both by locals and by people from further away. A forest of exotic trees and shrubs grows along the covered passageways and, in the newer section of the mall, a venerable oak tree hosts regular gatherings of birds and teenagers. The mall contains two cre©ches, the city-centre post office, and stalls for local charities öas well as the usual chain stores and anchor stores. Here, people work and shop and eat and sit and play; they touch and taste and smell and listen and watch. Indeed, one of the things we realised very early on in our research was that shoppingöand hence `consumption'öplays a much smaller role in this space than some of the literature on `postindustrial cities' led us to believe. Many people, and not just teenagers, seem to do nothing very much in the mall. They stroll, they hang out, they check out the latest exhibition (see also Matthews et al, 2000; Shields, 1989). The many uses of the space are tolerated, and even encouraged, by the mall management, as this comment from a manager bears out: ``We are the High Street and the main road in Milton Keynes. It isn't just the shops though that attract people, it's the leisure facilities and the places where people can sit and eat their sandwiches öit's the whole environment'' (Curtis, 2004, page 16). In our research, we set out to explore how people were using and experiencing this undercover `high street and main road'. Along the way, we began to realise that we needed different ways of explaining and describing what we saw and felt happening there. Specifically, we realised that many of the accounts of designed urban spaces failed to capture the diversity and the complexity of the practices in this particular place. The following two examples give a flavour of what we found going on in the Milton Keynes mall. The space of Milton Keynes mall is punctuated by a dynamic array of visual and spatial interventions, which occur against the background of the architectural design of the structure. These intrusions of the `spectacular' might include an appearance by the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car in the centre of a corridor, a full Italian market in a courtyard, celebrity signature sessions, staged TV shows, holiday-home exhibitions, new-car displays, craft shows, and Christmas wonderlands, amongst others. All of these things are made banal, but nonetheless popular for that, by their frequency. Indeed, what struck us forcibly during our research in the mall was the high level of interaction between users of the mall and these kinds of shows and exhibitions. People displayed a rich range of engagements with elements of the built environment of the mall. Our observation of a new-car show in the exhibition hall, located in front of one of the anchor stores, revealed the variable quality of this engaged spatial practice (figure 2). People, all sorts of people, moved through this space and encountered its displays in a variety of ways: giving a lingering glance to the cars, perhaps approaching one, touching it, maybe even climbing into it. The sales staff appeared used to this behaviour and, when we observed them, hardly ever seemed to approach anyone to try to sell them anything. It was as if they had learnt that visitors to their display were rarely there to buy but, rather, just to `play': to look, touch, experiment (What can this car/toy do? What happens if I push this button? How does this sunroof work?). Other people practised the skills they needed to cross this space without engaging with the display at all. People traverse the mall exhibition area all the time, whether it is occupied or empty. During an exhibition there are always some people who continue to do just thatöcross the space to get to its other side, rather than view the displayed goods and installations. People seemed to do this by being very focused on where they were heading, rather than what might be in their way, though no one ever bumped into anything in their path.
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Figure 2. A group pauses to examine a show vehicle in the exhibition hall (photo, Caitlin DeSilvey).
We also spent some time observing a clock in the newer part of the mall. The clock is a large, mechanical, toy-like object, mounted high in front of a series of escalators and facing a cafe¨. Every hour it starts an elaborate chiming process, with golden balls rolling and the recorded sound of children laughing. This display culminates with the rotation of a large metal frog: at the climax of the spectacle, a fan opens behind the frog
Figure 3. Children and parents beneath the kinetic frog clock during its hourly performance (photo, Caitlin DeSilvey).
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and bubbles spew out of its mouth (figure 3). This spectacular event has become part of the routine in the mall. Many people gather and wait for it to chime, especially those in the mall with small children. The children will often run to play with the bubbles, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes encouraged by their parents. Older people smile at this play, while teenagers mimic it. The design of the clock clearly invites such interaction, but it is an invitation taken upöand taken up by a range of people in a range of different ways. Indeed, we also witnessed much more passive objects gaining the active attention of passers-by. For example, during our fieldwork a series of life-size model cows were scattered throughout the mall, variously decorated, and on display to advertise china ornaments on the same theme. The cows were not mechanical but motionless; yet people wandered up to them, walked around them, gently patted them. Children had far fewer inhibitions, and one of us counted four young boys in the space of twenty minutes who ran up to the nose of one cow and `bopped' it (figure 4). A certain liveliness of relations between objects and people was very obvious, then, but so too were the number of different kinds of relations: a sort of focused ignoring that enabled people to navigate their way through the car show; a playful spectacle; different kinds of touching. All of these things were far removed from the picture of people implied in so much of the literature on designed urban environments, which the next section describes. So, while Milton Keynes might not be your `average' city centre, we found it an interesting place to think more about how highly designed urban spaces are experienced and how they might be working in contemporary cities. While we do not have any definitive answer to that question, the rest of this paper suggests what the parameters of such an answer might be.
Figure 4. Casual encounters with a cow in the shopping centre (photo, Caitlin DeSilvey).
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Experiencing urban design in urban theory The vivacity and the variability of the practices that occur in the Milton Keynes mall immediately pose a problem for much of the existing literature on urban design. In order to explain why we think this is so, we pause here to consider the relation that much of that literature assumes between the urban citizen and the urban environment. A range of urban theorists have addressed themselves to a catalogue of material features associated with designed urban environments, including public artworks, outdoor advertising campaigns, mall design, branding, designed streetscapes, shopping malls, theme parks, the architectural and infrastructural development associated with mega-events and exhibitions, and renovated heritage districts öall, bar this last, to be found in Milton Keynes (Allen, 2006; Boyer, 1992; Cronin, 2006; Dicks, 2000; Goss, 1993; 1999; Hannigan, 1998; Lury, 2004; Madanipour, 1996; Miles, 2000). While all of these phenomena have long, complex, and interconnected histories, their contemporary conjunction, according to many analysts, is producing a city of surfaces, calculated for a primarily visual effect. Several academic theorists have returned to earlier generations of critics, such as Benjamin and Simmel, to explore the affective states that designed environments are said to induce, and to argue that seduction (Allen, 2006; Jewell, 2001) and distraction are key sensations in these aestheticised spaces (Friedberg, 1993; Urry, 2002). Drawing on similar sources, Featherstone (1991) claimed that the recombination of the signs, images, and symbols of consumer society was producing an ``aestheticization of everyday life'', to form a synthetic ``poetic unconscious'' for urban citizens. What is also new is the way in which the design schemes of the last few decades have been subsidised by global capital (Boyer, 1988; Urry, 1995; Zukin, 1995) or deliberately adopted for the purposes of place marketing and promotion (Degen, 2003; Deutsche, 1996; Julier, 2005; Warde, 2001). A ``new regime of signification'' (Jacobs, 1998, page 253) seems to place increasing importance on urban design as a tool with which developers and local councils sell themselves in a global market as attractive investment or tourist locations (Hubbard, 1996; Mandanipour 2006; Ploger, 1995; Wansborough and Mageean, 2000). Indeed, urban design has been described as `a competitive good' (Rouse, 2002). Design codes in particular have been contextualised in these terms. And although Mandanipour (2006) suggests that design codes are adopted because they can also enhance how places function for their users, and some advocates argue for `community' consultation as part of implementing a design process (Carmona et al, 2002), a recent authoritative survey of their `use and potential' neglected to consult any actual users of designed environments (Carmona and Magalhaes, 2006). Several of the professions most centrally involved in the production of designed spacesöfor example, architecture (Lees, 2001) and public art (Hall and Robertson, 2001; Sharpe et al, 2005)öseem to lack a convincing way to acknowledge and explain users' aesthetic experience, and even the authors of more nuanced accounts of malls often fail to explore what their visitors think of them (Goss, 1999). Hence, our interest is in the experiencing of such designed spaces. Urban critics have often made claims about the effects of designed spaces on people's behaviour. According to Dovey (1999), the renewed attention being paid to the designed dimension of urban environments works to deflect resources from other (more legitimate) social investments, creating a depoliticised urban citizenry too dazzled to recognise that their built environment has been co-opted by forces whose main concern is boosting consumption and consolidating wealth. Harvey (1989, page 305) blamed ``the reactionary politics of an aestheticized spatiality'' for the indifference and inertia of the urban populace. Malls, in particular, are viewed as `pseudoplaces' in which the `consciousness industry' (that is, developers, architects, and designers) manipulate
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individuals' behaviour and control spatial practices and experiences (Jewell, 2001). Although Featherstone (1991) and Hall and Hubbard (1998), among others, have noted the need for analysis of the way that people experience these newly designed places, specific encounters with designed environmentsöthe kinds of thing happening in Milton Keynes mall, for exampleöhave rarely been investigated in the critical urban studies literature. This absence implies that inhabitants of urban spaces are a submissive audience of the spectacle, anesthetised by aestheticisation and dulled by design. Towards a different understanding of urban aestheticisation Our sense of the Milton Keynes mall was, above all, one of liveliness öa liveliness shared both by its human and by its nonhuman occupants and, maybe more importantly, a liveliness produced through their interaction. Why, then, does so much of the existing literature on designed urban environments not address this dynamic and energetic relation between people and their physical environment? A full answer is beyond the scope of this paper, but we want briefly to suggest at least two reasons here. Firstly, a certain Marxist legacyöevident most particularly in the work of Harvey and Jewellösuggests that urban design is little more than ideology, a false veneer covering the truth of capitalism's various logics; analytical attention is thus focused on those logics. Secondly, the shadow of Debord hangs over much of this work and affects the understanding of visuality in particular. Debord insisted that experience in these environments was part of the `spectacularisation' of public life; in other words, a ``total justification of the existing system's conditions and goals'' which induced ``hypnotic behaviour'' (Debord, 1999, pages 96, 97). His account offers an impoverished vocabulary to describe urban visual experiences; and it offers no sense at all of active and engaged spectatorship in relation to spectacles. Indeed, in both cases, reactions to designed urban environment seem to be shaped only by access to critical urban theory. Only this can explain why critics of these objects and spaces can see the design of urban environments for what it is, whereas most of the people actually using those spaces in their everyday lives cannot öinstead, they are described as `seduced' or `hypnotised'. At this point, however, we need to be clear that, although sustained studies of how people experience designed urban environments are almost nonexistent in the critical urban studies literature, many other writers have theoretically framed the role of the urban subject more actively. Boyle and Hughes (cited by Hubbard, 1996, page 1447) note that urban redesign schemes can lead to ``consciousness of falsity'' as well as false consciousness, for example. Jacobs (1998, page 273) calls attention to the way in which a local politics of difference can ``unsettle the assumptions that ... cast aestheticization simply as an instrumental mechanism in legitimating capital accumulation and deactivating politics.'' Lees, in her work on the multiple and unexpected uses of Vancouver's public library, has argued for a critical architectural theory that considers both semiotic readings of space and `active and embodied' engagements with lived buildings (Lees, 2001, page 75), and Llewellyn (2003) reiterates her argument. Malls and other spaces are always open to reversals, destabilisations, and inversions of the intended model of behaviour and experience (Dovey, 1989, page 135; Erkip, 2003; Goss, 1999; Manzo, 2005; Shields, 1989). Stevens and Dovey (2004) offer an account of South Bank in Melbourne, Australiaöa spectacularised designed space, they sayöwhich describes an array of activities undertaken particularly in what they call `underprogrammed spaces', which rivals the richness we observed in Milton Keynes's centre. This work is very helpful to our project, and we would add one further particular inflection to its emphasis on active encounters with urban environments: the need for an expanded understanding of visuality. We are in agreement with much of the
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literature we are discussing that the design transformation of many cities is apprehended primarily (though not exclusively) through the visual sense. Relevant work in other fields attempts to reanimate diverse possibilities of visual experience by placing it in relation to an expanded field of bodily and social experience (Degen, 2007; Kester, 2004; Kester and Buck-Morss, 1997; Pinney, 2004). There are three key characteristics to this reworking of the visual experience. The first is that experiences are theorised as performative. That is, visual experiences are generated through particular practices, at specific times and places, with constitutive consequences both for the object and for the subject involved (for a sympathetic approach see DeSilvey and Yusoff, 2006; Edensor, 2005; Inglis and Hughson, 2000; Rose, 2003). Secondly, such experiences are relational: the interaction between spectator and object produces the qualities of the object, and vice versa. Bourriaud (2002) in fact coined the term `relational aesthetics' to describe a range of contemporary art practices that produce `open' processes of social interaction rather than completed art objects. Because the term `relational aesthetics' encourages the apprehension of moments of visual reception and relation, in a manner attuned to the embodied aspects of experience and to the specific practices and potentialities of everyday life, it is a useful one with which to explore the kind of urban experiences we are interested in. Thirdly, and following Crary's (1999) account of the production of visuality as embodied, we would note that visuality is always multimodal: that is, visual experiences are almost always accompanied by aural, tactile, and oral experiences; and in the case of designed urban environments, by certain spatialities such as form, route, and volume. This approach to the visual experiencing of urban space parallels and extends the work of geographers interested in the everyday use of spaces, and in the way in which the experience of those spaces is a consequence of the complex, embodied practices that constitute and animate them (Amin and Thrift, 2002; Crouch, 2003; Dewsbury et al, 2002; Harrison, 2000; Wylie, 2002). Some academic accounts of specific kinds of space have, for a while now, begun to attend more closely to the experience of the inhabitants (Degen, 2001; Gregson et al, 2002; Highmore, 2002; Latham and McCormack, 2004; Laurier et al, 2001; Llewellyn, 2003). This work operates from the understanding that the city cannot be reduced to form or representation, but ``is continually reproduced through use and everyday life'' (Borden et al, 2001, page 13). Hence we, like Latham and McCormack (2004, page 709), refuse ``to write or read off the feeling, style or atmosphere of a particular place as the `effect' of some already determined relations.'' ``The expressive quality of urban materiality is not necessarily a cynical aesthetic veneer that needs to be stripped away to get to reality'', they argue. ``The expressiveness of place is a constitutive part of its mix, the event of its moving materiality'' (page 709). In moving towards practice, however, we do not want to lose sight of the particular dynamics of the visual, which are surely at work in quite specific ways in the urban environment we are interested in. How best to access `moving materialities' is the subject of current methodological debate (Cresswell, 2003; Latham, 2003). The methods we developed in the course of the project took on shades of psychogeography (Pinder, 2005), phenomenology, and ethnomethodology (Laurier and Philo, 2004; Laurier et al, 2001), but ultimately we charted our own methodological path. We experimented with repeated, short ethnographic observation of certain locations and our own research diaries and photo-documentation; we asked others to participate with us in `go-alongs' (Colls, 2004; Kusenbach, 2003), and in making photo-essays and audio-diaries; and we staged an intervention around one of the most popular sculptures in the centre and recorded how people reacted. Although with each of these methods we came up against the difficulty of translating embodied sensation into verbal description (Taylor, 2002), the layering
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of different approaches was productive of some clear insights about the relational and performative qualities of urban aesthetic engagement. In the following sections, we return to the mall to work through three more specific aspects of our approach: first, we suggest a multimodal and sensuously embedded understanding of vision; second, a practice-centred understanding of the environment; and third, a need for a self-reflexive understanding of the researchers' position in the fieldwork. Rethinking urban experience 1: a more complex understanding of visuality We have already suggested that prevailing accounts of designed urban spaces make particular assumptions about how visuality works in urban spaces: people encounter urban environments and react to them by being seduced or dazzled. In this section we start to suggest a more complex and nuanced conceptualisation of the visual in urban spaces. There are two parts to our argument. One is that visual experience is much more complex and varied than more `traditional' conceptualisations allow. The second is that the visual very rarely works in isolation from other sensory engagements with space; as noted above, we thus insist on the multimodality of visuality. `Seeing' in urban spaces is not a uniform mode of experience but, rather, takes on different forms. Here, we offer some evidence from the research in Milton Keynes ö evidence that points to three distinct ways of seeing: manoeuvring, parenting, and shopping. There are obviously many more ways of seeing at work in the mall than these three, but this is not intended to be a comprehensive typology. Instead, we want to make the point that ways of seeing in the mall are considerably more diverse and complex than the simple `hypnotic spectacle' model offered by many critiques of designed urban environments. In this paper we have already hinted at one of these ways of looking: `manoeuvring'öa way of looking which is used when walking around the mall from one place to another, when having to manoeuvre and navigate a way through the mall. This is a broad, surveying gaze which is used to move around objects, which acknowledges objects but does not engage in any depth with them. ``A zig-zag row of yellow caution signs next to the John Lewis entrance, on a no longer wet floor. People navigate around them without looking'' (January 2005, ethnographic observation). The immediate environment falls into the background and walking happens almost automatically. This look happens particularly often in familiar environments, when we navigate almost blindly. ``I know all the shops here, so I know whether I want to go in them or not, as I go down the corridors, here, looking at the shops, like, do I need to go into that shop, so if they are something new, I want to find out what that's about so the next time I can just either ignore it or go in there'' (6 April 2005, go-along, male, age 32). In this `thin' or unfocused look, objects exist as part of a scene to be passed through, blurred together into indistinct background with very little sense of form and detail. When one has a specific destination in mind, it is very easy to blank out the intervening context. A `thicker', more engaged look appears when we approach the final destination of our walk and our eyes zoom in: a person we expect to meet, a specific shop, a desired object, a possible purchase perhaps öpulled out from the stream of material stimuli. This is the second look we want to mention here: the `shopping look'. When shopping, one's vision is more concentrated, actively searching for a desired product. As we look for it, we touch different materials. We sway from a `thinner', unfocused gaze that helps us to navigate around the shop to a `thicker', focused stare that involves touching and smelling, especially if the piece of clothing or perfume has a distinctive texture
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or odour. In the `shopping look' the direction of our gaze is guided by our sense of touch and smell (figure 5). The cold, iron zip of a pair of trousers is inspected for damage, an unpleasant smell moves the object away from us and leads to a `surveying gaze' on the whole product. ``The shopping expedition turns up a too-long pair of black trousers and a skirt with a broken zip. I duck in and out of four or five stores, spend longer in some than others ... . My passage through the space is smoother but blurrier. I cast about a vague acquisitive attention, taking in scenes and images as they pass, but rarely focusing in. In and out of shops, this skirt, that top. Colours, textures. A state of bland receptivity ... . I can't remember anything specific about the time. A blank there, where the stack of critical details would usually be'' (2 February 2005, ethnographic observation). Third, there is the `parenting look'. When one is in the mall as a carer with children, eyes and bodies are responsively attuned to the bodies and movements of the children. The mall and its sensory stimuli (windows, music, street furniture) fall into the background as the children's bodies are followed and the mall's geography turns into a (sometimes dangerous, other times fun) playground. ``Lots to say about the difference between going to the mall as a particular sort of `mother' rather than as a researcher. What struck me in particular was that I actually didn't pay much attention to the mall as a building at all most of the time. Partly because I wasn't at work (although perhaps I should have been), but also because, with two mobile kids, enjoying being with them, my eyes and ears and hands were tuned into them, focused on them, and not so much on the wider space. Where were they, what were they saying, what were they doing. This was in relation to many material objects, of course, and also to other peopleöbut with other
Figure 5. Looking, smelling, touching ö and tasting ö at a food stall in the shopping centre courtyard (photo, Caitlin DeSilvey).
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people I wasn't trying to fathom their motives, they just were there'' (29 March 2005, research diary). Sometimes it is possible almost to see and sense through the eyes of the children. We attune our perceptions to those of a child and read anew the affordances of a place as we learn that a public sculpture becomes a skeleton to climb on, the edge of a fountain a running track. One point to emphasise is that each of these modes of looking also entails ways of not looking. For example, we found repeatedly that when we were with somebody else in the mall, we tended to focus our attention on the interaction with that person. Neither person then seems to pay a lot of attention to other people or the surroundings. This is reflected in the go-along recordings in particular. Often, a more general conversation was interrupted by a moment of recognition or encounter in the mall, a focused looking at a shop or an item of interest. Little scraps of conversation were left and picked up again. A sudden whiff of smell or the sound of a song sparked memories and situated the view in a personal realm: ``the `elements' of architecture are not visual units or gestalt; they are encounters, confrontations that interact with memory'' (Pallasma, 2005, page 63). Ways of (not) seeing, then, are varied and complex. The second point about visuality in the centre is that not only are there different ways of looking at the mall environmentöwhich include blanking it out in different waysöbut that these different ways of looking also entail different sensory engagements. Visual perception is not a singular sense: it is always gained through other sensory stimuli and mediated by intersubjective relations between people and objectsöperhaps more so in an urban setting than in any other (Simmel, 1971). We `see' through the interplay of all the senses, so that it becomes ``an activity that enunciates and gives shape to urban spaces; one that is not localized but that `spatializes' '' (Pinder, 2005, page 5). This leads us to suggest that urban landscapes are experienced through a broad variety of visual modalities, inflected through a diversity of other sensory registers. Thus, different visualities imply different tactilities and auralities. Seeing, for example, is affected by the experience of sound in space. `Aural clutter' can lead over into visual perception to generate a sense of visual clutter. Similarly, seeing is often connected to touching, the impulse to reach out and feel an object, a piece of fabric. Yet, what we are looking at and how we look at it will inform how we touch an object: remember those small boys bopping the plastic cows; or the adults playing with real, shiny new cars. A more nuanced analysis of the modalities of seeing in designed environments leads to a performative understanding of visuality as a process that animates and is animated by potential qualities of a specific place through sensory and embodied engagements. Seeing in this case becomes a deeply differentiated, variable, and contextual action, which strongly suggests that experiencing designed city centres is very much not just a seductive and spectacular activity. Rethinking urban experience 2: focus on practice The previous section also implied the second element of a revised understanding of experiencing designed urban environments, namely, the embedding of design in the practices that animate urban spaces and visualities. Much critical work adopts a broadly semiological methodology, in which the viewer either `reads off ' and interprets the meanings of certain features in the built environment from the processes of their production or from their formal qualitiesöor fails to do so, and is thus seduced and dazzled. The approach explored here, instead, shifts towards examining the way that embodied engagements animate the potential qualities of a specific space (Dewsbury et al, 2002). Others have also argued persuasively for a practice-based approach to
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urban studies, drawing on a renewed interest in the performative aspects of lived experience (Latham, 2003; Laurier et al, 2001): ``the engine for landscape's being is practice: everyday agents calling the landscape into being as they make it relevant for their own lives, strategies and projects'' (Rose, 2002, page 457). A study of the experiencing of urban space needs to attend to the way in which visual regimes are `activated' by specific actions, movements, gestures, and recognitions (Jacobs, 1998, page 275). Our Milton Keynes research worked with one site where these activations were particularly visible and intense; the rest of this section uses this site to draw out some observations about how research on urban aesthetics might attend to the intricacies of practice and performance. At the edge of an enclosed open-air courtyard, in the centre of the Milton Keynes shopping mall, stand six slightly oversized bronze figures, mounted on a square bronze base. The cast of characters is assorted: a woman in a fur coat clutches a shopping bag and a leash fastened to a dachshund; a young, shirtless boy balances his weight on a bronze bicycle; a woman in platform heels and a short skirt accompanies a small boy, who reaches out from his pushchair; a man holds a small, pigtailed girl on his shoulders. Although the figures are placed tightly on the platform, all of them face out, away from each other. The piece, Vox Pop, by artist John Clinch, was sited in 1988 to offer a point of interest for people in the shopping centre. We can understand the piece as an element of the `designing' of the space on the part of the mall managers and public art consultants. But even a few minutes of observation are enough to reveal that something quite complex goes on with this piece. Vox Pop is animated daily and diversely through a series of complex physical and visual encounters. Children use the figures as climbing frame and play structure, scrambling up the stiff limbs to sit on the immobile heads and dangle legs off bike handlebars. Toddlers pat the dog excitedly and touch the outstretched hand of the boy in the pushchair. Adolescents show off for their friends by acting out obscene gestures and sticking anomalous objects onto the figures: a string of green chewing gum emerges from the father's nose; a shoe is wedged next to a bronze head and then removed. People lean distractedly against the figures as they talk on their mobile phones (figure 6). Families assemble themselves in front of the figures for group portraits. Other people glance at the figures and share comments with their companions, or reach out to touch the sculpture as they walk past (the dog's head is burnished from repeated pattings). The figures are caught up in a bewildering range of different social and material practices. There are undeniable activations of social and visual potential that occur in the field of encounter around these inert objects. People appear to interact with Vox Pop differently depending in part on who they are, but also on what they are doing. A strong sense of difference and variation characterises the way Vox Pop is encountered. People who pass through the courtyard on their way to the other side of the mall, intent on the labour of shopping or grabbing a sandwich during their lunch break, may not register the presence of the bronze figures at all. Those present with a small child may approach the sculpture as either an entertaining diversion or as an irritating distraction. A recent survey by Mintel (2004) identified 20% of shoppers as `shopping centre socialites': these modern flaªneurs may be more receptive to the presence of the sculpture, and its role in concentrating and initiating social relations (Friedberg, 1993). For mall workers, the sculpture may function primarily as a place for rubbish to accumulateöa node demanding of intensified care. As Jacobs has observed, it is important not to overlook the ``diminutive articulations'' of difference that play through the contemporary city (1998, page 259).
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Figure 6. A man on a mobile phone uses Vox Pop (John Clinch, 1988) as prop (photo, Caitlin DeSilvey).
Although these articulations of difference occur on a diminutive scale, they are not isolated from the exercise of power and the spatial production of identity. A microstudy of embodied practice can be combined with a macroreflection on the politics of difference in the urban environment. The Vox Pop sculpture offers a curious window into this field of inquiry, since, on the surface of things, it seems to be attempting to reflect differenceöor at least diversityöback at the `public' that inhabits the mall. The deliberate representation of different ages and races and classes border on caricature, a point that has not gone unnoticed by observers. During a survey of Milton Keynes citizens' perception of the city's public art, one woman commented on the ``stereotypical'' depiction of the young, apparently black, woman with the pushchair (Grennan and Sperandio, 2001). Her detailed critique contrasts with the tendency for many mall users to identify the collective of figures vaguely as a `family' grouping, an assumption that can only suggest that they have not looked very closely at the piece. Other groups of people seemed to respond to the piece as an invitation to display their own collective identity. We observed several instances in which large families, of various ethnic origins, assembled themselves in front of the figures for group portraits. The spatialised constitution of gendered, sexualised, racialised, and classed subject positions in urban spaces (see, for example Keith, 2002; Morris, 1988; Skeggs et al, 2004) takes on a different cast when specific performances like these are taken into consideration. A study of practiced engagements remains attentive to the diverse, mobile, and relational subjectivities that work through public space. Senie, in a rare treatment of the social and performative aspects of public artwork, comments, ``public art is reframed by its immediate audience to fit the parameters of everyday life'' (2003, page 197). The same observation could be applied to other designed
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elements of the urban built environment. People and things produce aesthetic relations through specific, everyday practices: touching, looking, photographing, sitting, listening, climbing. The material built form is placed dialogically by intensities and textures of relations. Rethinking urban experience 3: a certain kind of reflexivity The third aspect of our approach to understanding people's experiences of designed urban environments as relational, embodied practices of multiple and multimodal visualities is the view that research into such practices can be reflexive. This is both a theoretical position and one we learnt during the many hours we spent in Milton Keynes mall. If we are interested in ``performing acts of seeing'' in all their lived diversity (Bal, 2003, page 11), then we should be more attentive to what is being done, not only by others in a space like Milton Keynes centre, but also by ourselves as researchers. After all, we too gazed and strolled, listened and touched as we observed, and we too took photographs. There is, of course, a way of analysing geographical fieldwork which characterises it precisely in terms of a certain sort of gaze: a gaze at once seduced by, and desiring to remain distanced from, its object (Haraway, 1991; Rose, 1993). As many scholars have more recently pointed out, the looks mobilised in fieldwork are in fact often far more complicated, vulnerable, and puzzled than that account allows (Matless, 2000; Nash, 1996). Although Goss's (1999, page 49) essay on the Mall of America explicitly says that ``the critic's task is not to rudely wake up the consumer to the reality outside of consumption'', nonetheless, in writing about malls, public art, and what are seen as designed urban spaces more generally, the impression often remains that the role of the researcher/critic is to resist the charms of the glossy surfaces in order to reveal the true effects of these environments, objects, and spaces. We do not find this mode of critiqueöin which the critic understands better than apparently any of those actually using the mall (who are not, therefore, asked for their opinion)öparticularly palatable. And this critical mode is also incompatible with a sense of research practice being just one among many other ways of `doing' the mall. Bal (2003) insists that the performative and relational qualities of looking are as much part of critical work as they are of all other kinds of visual practices. Indeed, she pushes this argument further to argue that objects are brought into particular forms of being through that act of criticism. ``The so-called empirical object does not exist `out there' but is brought into existence in the encounter between object and analyst, mediated by the theoretical baggage each brings to that encounter'' (Bal, 2003, pages 23 ^ 24). This understanding of the critic as essentially entangled in what they are studying is very different from the distanced analytical stand offered by so many accounts of aestheticised urban spaces. It places the critic much more in the middle of things: a participant in visualities rather than merely their observer. And what the critic learns from that entanglement, and inscribes into their research, constitutes their reflexivity. One of the things we learnt from Milton Keynes mall was just how hard it is to distance yourself from such a space. It took us a while to learn this, and at first this felt like a sort of critical failure. As we sat observing, sometimes on benches, sometimes in cafe¨s sipping coffee or juice, or strollingöoccasionally doing a bit of shopping ourselves, or running an errand öwhat emerged was an ambiguous sense of the researcher's gaze, the shifting back and forth between different subject positions. We discovered that it is it's difficult to be attentive in places like shopping malls. Passage through these places can generate a simultaneous öand disorienting ösense of simulation and sedation (Morris, 1988). Other perceptual paradoxes arise through the blurring
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of various analytical boundaries which we often use to make sense of (other) spaces: between inside and outside, private and public space, control and creative expression, commercial and municipal property, the spectacular and the banal, the researcher and the mother. The effect of all this blurriness can be dulling, even to the researchers who should, in theory, be able to think their way out of this state of induced critical exhaustion. Facing the baffling surfaces of Milton Keynes mall, we suspected at first that we were simply not being critical enough: that we too were being seduced by its everyday glamour like all those other apparent dopes. And indeed we think we were seduced. But then we began to think that perhaps this was not entirely a problem. What could we learn from this sense of being in the midst of it all? This paper is one response to that question; another was to turn to the methodological suggestions in the work of geographers such as Latham (2003), Pratt (2000), and Smith (2000), who have written about research as a performative act: engaged, provisional, constantly remade with specific participants. They too have explored the feelings of uncertainty and disorientation that accompany the effort to see the apparent failings of fieldwork as offering their own sorts of understanding. But they also argue for the strengths of this particular approach to fieldwork. In particular, it allows different research questions to be asked; it allows for a fuller acknowledgement of the agency of those people and things being researched; and a greater sensitivity to their priorities and understanding. In short, acknowledging the performative doing of fieldwork ``can embody, enact, and thus respect the creativity of social practice'' (Latham, 2003, page 1994). One of the things this approach helped us to realise was that, as we looked, we were looked back at. We have already noted that visuality is very important to the
Figure 7. The researcher, seated at an outdoor table, photographs a family as they photograph themselves (photo, Monica Degen).
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sociability of Milton Keynes mall. The mall is a social event because it is in part also a visual event. People go there just to look and in turn to be looked at. Objects too are part of this visual environment. Through their compelling presence, we could say that they watch and are watched. Shop window displays, mannequins, brands and logos, plantings, maps, birds, information, public art öBerman (2001) discusses Times Square in New York in similar terms. He describes the looks exchanged among passersby, signs, street lights, workers, citing Baudelaire's notion of a `family of eyes' in order to evoke something of this quality of visual sociability with its webs of identification, recognition, and misrecognition. As researchers, our gazes entered this visual field, and we became part of it, both observed and observing (figure 7). But this field is highly differentiated. We moved between different modes of looking as we took notes, shopped, drifted bored, or worried at something. And sometimes the visual just disappeared: we found that when we started talking to each other öchatting, about the project or other thingsöwe simply didn't see the mall any more. And, of course, even when we were sitting down, observing, photographing, note taking, we were doing precisely what a lot of other people were doing in the mall too (bar the note taking): simply looking, describing, observing. In the end, reflexively, we learnt that we too became part of the family of eyes in Milton Keynes mall. But this was not a failure. It taught us about the importance of different practices of seeing, about their richness and complexity, and about the mobility of the subject positions they create. These are lessons which, we suggest, should be brought to bear on understandings of how designed environments are experienced, as well as on research practices in urban spaces, and we suggest that reflexivity should be an inherent part of those understandings. Conclusions It is clear that, over the past twenty years, something has shifted in many cities. Many are using `design' as an important part of their redevelopment and self-representation. And while there are many ways to understand this shift, our argument has been that, so far, too much has been assumed about how the people who inhabit and use those designed spaces react to them. Our aim in this paper has not been to debunk other approaches to understanding those changes: instead, we argue that more work needs to be done in researching how those spaces are actually experienced. Learning both from Milton Keynes mall and from a range of theorists of the visual and the practised, we have worked with a more performative and relational sense of that experiencing, and have attempted to grasp some of the complexities animating the visual field in designed urban spaces: complexities which include the variety of ways of looking, the things such ways cannot see, the multimodal nature of looking, the sensory embeddedness of vision and its imbrication in practices and with objects. We have suggested too that such research needs to be reflexive, since researchers too are performative animators of the field they study. At another level, however, the intent of our broader projectöbarely broached in this paperöhas been to supplement the existing critique of capitalist urban spaces. If the world in which many of us live is indeed increasingly spectacularised, it may be time to begin to imagine a more nuanced critical vocabulary than the one that currently dominates debates about urban spaces (see also Goss, 1999; Julier, 2006). What critical tools might allow us to engage with that spectacularisation rather than (or, better, as well as) refusing it and looking for other refusals? How might we think critically with instead of against seduction and immersion? How can we engage with the potentials of the visual without hope of rescue by images which show the truth? The complexity and the banality of contemporary urban experiences are ``too often stripped bare by the rush to theoretical order'' (Amin and Thrift, 2002, page 3),
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an order which thus far has not been adequate to the contemporary complexities of urban visualities. We are certainly not claiming that our approach is adequate for explaining the dynamic of urban spatialities and visualities on its own; there is a clear need for theoretical and methodological pluralism in studies of the urban (Borden et al, 2001; Dovey, 1989). But there is also a need to come up with other ways of thinking about urban aesthetics, ways which allow us to say other things and, crucially, to occupy other critical positions. References Allen J 2006, ``Ambient power: Berlin's Potsdamer Platz and the seductive logic of public spaces'' Urban Studies 43 441 ^ 455 Amin A, Thrift N, 2002 Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Polity Press, Cambridge) Aronovitch D, 2001 Paddling to Jerusalem (Fourth Estate, London) Bal M, 2003, ``Visual essentialism and the object of visual culture'' Journal of Visual Culture 2 5 ^ 32 Berman M, 2001, ``Too much is not enough: metamorphoses of Times Square'', in Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era Ed. T Smith (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL) pp 39 ^ 70 Borden I, Kerr J, Rendell J, Pivaro A, 2001 The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Public Space (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) Bourriaud N, 2002 Relational Aesthetics (Les Presses du Re¨el, Paris) Boyer M C, 1988, ``The return of aesthetics to city planning'' Society 25(May/June) 49 ^ 56 Boyer M C, 1992, ``Cities for sale: merchandising history at South Street Seaport'', in Variations on a Theme Park Ed. M Sorkin (The Noonday Press, New York) pp 181 ^ 204 Bryson B, 1995 Notes from a Small Island (Black Swan, Evanston, IL) Carmona M, Magalhaes C, 2006, ``Public space management: present and potential'' Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 49 75 ^ 99 Carmona, M, Punter J, Chapman D, 2002 From Design Policy to Design Quality (Thomas Telford, London) Clapson M, 2004 Milton Keynes: Middle England/Edge City (Frank Cass, London) Colls R, 2004, `` `Looking alright, feeling alright': emotions, sizing, and the geographies of women's experience of clothing consumption'' Social and Cultural Geography 5 583 ^ 596 Crary J, 1999 Suspensions of Perception (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) Cresswell T, 2003,``Landscape and the obliteration of practice'', in Handbook of Cultural Geography Eds K Anderson, M Domosh, S Pile, N Thrift (Sage, London) pp 269 ^ 281 Cronin A, 2006, ``Advertising and the metabolism of the city: urban space, commodity rhythms'' Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 615 ^ 632 Crouch D, 2003, ``Spacing, performing, and becoming: tangles in the mundane'' Environment and Planning A 35 1945 ^ 1960 Curtis A, 2004, ``Aiming to be top'' The Milton Keynes Citizen 9 September, page 16 Debord G, 1999, ``Separation perfected'', in Visual Culture: The Reader Eds J Evans, S Hall (Sage, London) pp 95 ^ 98 Degen M, 2001, ``Sensed appearances: sensing the performance of place'' Space and Culture 11/12 52 ^ 69 Degen M, 2003, ``Fighting for the global catwalk: formalising public life in Castlefield (Manchester) and diluting public life in el Raval (Barcelona)'' International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27 868 ^ 880 Degen M, 2007 Sensing Cities: Urban Aesthetics in a Global Age (Routledge, London) forthcoming DeSilvey C, Yusoff K, 2006, ``Art and geography: image and imagination'', in Companion Encyclopaedia of Geography Eds I Douglas, R Huggett, C Perkins (Routledge, London) pp 573 ^ 588 Deutsche R, 1996 Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) Dewsbury J D, Harrison P, Rose M, Wylie J, 2002, ``Enacting geographies'' Geoforum 33 437 ^ 440 Dicks B, 2000 Heritage, Place and Community (University of Wales Press, Cardiff) Dovey K, 1999 Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form (Routledge, London) Edensor T, 2005 Industrial Ruins: Aesthetics, Materiality and Memory (Berg, London) Erkip F, 2003, ``The shopping mall as an emergent public space in Turkey'' Environment and Planning A 35 1073 ^ 1093 Featherstone M, 1991 Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (Sage, London) Friedberg A, 1993 Window Shopping (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA)
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