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Cultural Capitals of Europe (Athens, Glasgow, Lisbon, Thessaloniki)" by Anastasia Paparis
Anastasia Paparis - Architect A.U.Th., Town Planner U.C.L., M. Phill., M.RT.P.I.
Anastasia Paparis
CULTURAL CAPITALS OF EUROPE:
The cultural infrastructure, the urban interventions and the spatial identity of four Cities – ECOCs
(Athens, Glasgow, Lisbon & Thessaloniki)
Abstract
The article presents synoptically the results of the cultural infrastructure and urban interventions. It is based on the analysis of four cities which became Cultural Capitals of Europe (European Capitals of Culture - ECOC: Athens 1985, Glasgow 1990, Lisbon 1994 and Thessaloniki 1997). A comprehensive consideration of the relationship between their urban spatial structure and the spatial programming shall be attempted by applying the concept of ‘spatial syntactic identity’. This concept is defined theoretically by ‘urbanity’ and ‘intelligibility’ within the framework of Space Syntax Analysis theory. This comprehensive analysis leads to some useful evaluation of the impact the ECOC institution had on the spatial structure of the European cities, the apprehension of their rich urban and architectural heritage, as well as on the quality of life. This approach to ECOC as an institution bases analysis mainly what relationship there comes into existence between urban culture and urban development. The convergences and divergences among findings reflect the common ‘womb’ of the cultural characteristics of the typology of European urban spatial structures, as well as the ways in which the relationship between these structures and building or / and urban interventions were decided. They also underline the need for further debate and the evocation of new knowledge, in order that European Capitals of Culture are appreciated as institutions with objectivity and justice, in order to go ahead even more creatively into the new era which has already started. This presentation is based on the author’s PhD research under the same subject.
Α) Introduction
The institution of European Capitals of Culture was initiated in 1983, after an idea proposed by the ever memorable Melina Mercouris, when Greek minister of Culture. The aim is to “bring European people close and together”(delete all the rest: in an attempt to support the unique world – wide endeavor of contemporary era, the unification of Europe.) In the passing of time, European cities understood that, in the composite object of discovering our common cultural background and the revealing of every city particularities, they have also to include their socio-economic prospects, articulating town and cultural planning. (Alternative suggestion: With time, those cities which were designated to be European Capitals of Culture came to understand that this institution offers a unique chance to discover the common cultural background of Europe. They discovered this can be done best by revealing the particularities of each city. Furthermore they saw two conditions would make this into a workable process, namely the institution would have to include the way every town articulates its socio-economic prospects and use of cultural planning as tool should be refined by culture itself when implementing the year’s program.)
Glasgow was the first city to set the premise very clearly. When European Capital of Culture, the city used culture to resolve its acute problems of de-industrialization. From then on, more and more European Capitals of Culture, and not only they, have started to perceive culture as the central constituent of their development process. The experience gained is reinvested by the cities. It shows itself in their programs. Not only do these designated cities pursue fundamental goals of the institution, but also use culture to enhance quality of life, as well to promote their image.
If the most synoptic definition of culture is “a system of values and a life-style”, then development - and especially spatial development – has to be considered also as a concept evolving over time. I will refer briefly to some of the results of the research I did for my Ph.D. under the title “European Capitals of Culture: The contribution of the institution to the transformation of the cities’ cultural and spatial identity”. In the process four cities were investigated: Athens (ECOC 1985), Glasgow (ECOC 1990), Lisbon (ECOC1994) and Thessaloniki (ECOC 1997). I will refer to:
- the overall cultural infrastructure
- the new cultural infrastructure and urban interventions
- the discourse about (European) cities and their future
- the concept of spatial syntactic identity and its possible transformation,
due to the ECOC institution
B) The Overall Cultural Infrastructure
From all the cities which were ECOC during the first cycle (1985 – 1997), the four investigated cities focused above all on their cultural infrastructure and urban interventions.[1] Of course, the way they managed their existing as well as new infrastructure differs across the sample. It is believed that this had to do primarily with variations in their spatial planning contexts.
Athens conceived all its necessary infrastructure for 1985 within a vague planning context; the District and Development Plans were being elaborated upon parallel to being the first European Capital of Culture (Map A-1). Glasgow had a non - legitimated District Plan by1984 and, in addition, a collection of un-implemental Development Plans. This was mainly due to their mutual overlapping. Lisbon acquired a District Plan just in January 1994, the year of designation as ECOC. Thessaloniki is the only city which had District and Development Plans by planning law. They were used to facilitate the decision-making process with respect to the cultural infrastructure programming within the ECOC framework.
The geographical distribution of the same infrastructure performs similarities and differences. Athens is the city with the greatest infrastructure distribution (up to Epidaurus), while the other three cities, although referring to their entire urbanized areas, addressed the same relation in different ways, from Lisbon (concentrated) to Thessaloniki (expanding in the whole metropolitan area). Nevertheless, in all cases, a remarkable concentration of cultural activity in the city centers has been noticed, a phenomenon having its roots in older conceptualizations about urban cultural manifestations, an attitude that the ECOC committees appeared to be fighting from the era of Athens.
The infrastructure on an architectural scale (buildings, wholes) is ranked in a typology of six categories: a) spectacle / hearing (theatres, dancing halls, cine, multi / video), b) viewing (museums, photothèques, and glyptothèques), education (congress halls, libraries, and multi-purpose halls), visiting (historic and modern sites) and participation (workshops, clubs, open-air gathering places, and athletic grounds).[2] The classification was elaborated separately for each city, including the overall, as well as the new infrastructure, so that the efforts made by every city, be revealed. Furthermore, it was processed for all four cities, aiming at the revelation of typological similarities and differences among them.
Every city gave its own interpretation to the institution, emphasizing some of the infrastructural categories (Graphs 1-4). Athens, e.g., gave priority to the infrastructure of spectacle / hearing, viewing and education, while Glasgow to vewiness and visiting.
From a whole of 870 installations, Glasgow is the city with the greater number of installations (381, 43,79%), then Thessaloniki (204, 23,45%), then Lisbon (189, 21,73%) and finally Athens (96 installations, 11,03%, Graph 5). Typologically, most of the installations refer to viewing (316, 36,32%) and the least to education (78, 8,9%, Graph 6). Across the typological classification, the installations of spectacle / hearing and education perform the major concentration in the city centers, while the installations of participation in the peripheral quarters.
There has also been noticed considerable fluctuation across the sample with respect to two basic town planning indicators, namely ‘cultural installation per inhabitant of central municipality’ and ‘typological classification of installations per inhabitant of central municipality’ (tables 1 & 2).
C) The New Cultural Infrastructure and Urban Interventions
There were implemented 136 new installations on an architectural scale, where the installations for spectacle / hearing prevail, then the ones for viewing, then visiting and finally education, while there are not found any new installations for participation. In all four cases, the extended projects of restoration, recuperation or / and rehabilitation of historic or / and old and abandoned buildings prevail. The most prominent ideas for the typological organization of installations as well as the new trends in architecture were identified in the peripheral quarters, where more land was available and freedom for architectural creativity could flourish.
Athens is the ECOC with the greatest geographic distribution of new installations across the sample (Map A-2). According to the official correspondence of that time, between the Office for Athens 1985 and the municipalities of the Athens metropolitan area, Mr. Spyros Mercouris, Head of the Office for Athens 1985 pursued with zeal this goal, although the time available was extremely limited and there was a lack of previous collaboration in that scale[3].
Glasgow had a limited program of new infrastructure and this is mainly due to the fact that the city had already implemented some emblematic installations for the amelioration of its image and identity promotion. The Festivals Office collaborated with the local institutions in some extended projects of building restoration and urban interventions.
In Lisbon, the program was organized along a major urban Route, the Sétima Colina, with culturally significant public spaces, buildings and open-air gardens dating back from the 18th and 19th centuries, while the urban spatial interventions that took place, were equally interesting. The purpose was to reveal the city’s historic civility and through it their struggle for freedom and democracy.
Thessaloniki elaborated the most ambitious program for gaining new infrastructure and urban interventions. This program, a fairly small part of which had been implemented by the beginning of the 1997 manifestations, is characterized by a second originality: it is the first time that urban public space - and hence urban design- is so organically integrated to the program, while culture is legitimised as the key-concept of the otherwise necessary urban re-structuring.
D) The Discourse about the European City and its Future
From Athens 1985 to Thessaloniki 1997 we notice significant evolution with respect to the philosophy of the potential impact of flagship projects to the urban spatial restructuring. The discourse for the post – industrial European city, its demands, weaknesses, strengths and possibilities, is integrated all the more systematically in the ECOC programming. Issues of protection and revealing of cultural and architectural inheritance, protection of the environment, rehabilitation of disused, by previous modes of production installations, quality of life enhancement through the cultural functions decentralization, constitute some new challenges, around which ECOC programs evolve. This discourse dates from the Athens era, through the organization of exhibitions, congresses, national and international competitions of an architectural and / or urban scale etc. In this process, the prevailing concept was – and still is – the open public space, to which is associated the concept of urban / spatial identity.
E) The Spatial Syntactic Identity and its Probable Transformation in the Context of C.C.E. Institution: Convergences and Divergences
Apart from cultural infrastructure identification, classification and comparison, the basic and simultaneously composite question set in the research, has two components: a) do the cities designated as ECOCs afford some particular characteristics in their spatial structure and which provide them with some kind of uniqueness, responsible for their revealing as an important case of the European urbanism and justifying their nomination? And: b) suppose that the four cities – ECOCs afford these characteristics, how were these articulated within the ECOC program for cultural infrastructure and how did they contribute to the amelioration of the cities’ cultural and urban spatial structure?
The answer to these questions is attempted through the epistemological definition of the concept of ‘spatial syntactic identity’, which I propose to accrue as a ‘third – level’ syntactic concept, from two ‘second – level’ syntactic concepts, namely ‘urbanity’ and ‘intelligibility’. Urbanity and intelligibility are also defined through other ‘first level’ syntactic concepts, on which Space Syntax theory is based. It constitutes an elaborate – and laborious- process, which contributes, as I believe, to the extension of Space Syntax theory. [4]
Here are some of the findings of this complex analysis:
a) All syntactic identity cores (axes representing the urban public space network where higher degree of urbanity and intelligibility happen) are aa) morphologically continuous and bi-focal, where their 'beady-ring’ form prevails the linear form in all cores except in the case of Thessaloniki; ab) identified to the city centers of urban patterns of an eclectic form and not to the older historical centers, usually under ‘organic’ patterns, as well as the modernist urban spatial patters; ac) articulated to buildings or wholes of Art Nouveau / Art Déco architectural form; ad) loosely related to the district and neighborhood centers, as well as the peripheral cultural centers, programmed or / and implemented by the district and development plans; ae) not sufficiently used, even intuitively, by the ECOC infrastructure planning, as well as the national and international competitions set in the context of the institution.
b) The correlation of four cores with the architectural and urban infrastructure showed that: ba) the coinciding of syntactic identity cores and infrastructure is to be noticed in the urban eclectic pattern in Athens, Lisbon, Thessaloniki and in the hippodamean / griddy pattern in Glasgow, where most of the rehabilitated historic buildings are found (maps A-3, A-4). bb). Although the urban interventions were programmed across areas much broader than the urban identity cores, the absence of any correlation between them contributed to their marginalisation with respect to overall urban spatial structure and hence, to their failure in the urban regeneration. bc) The best correlation was found in Athens, then in Glasgow, then in Lisbon and finally in Thessaloniki.[5] In all cases, although a strong relationship between the cores and cultural infrastructure has been found in the city centers, this relationship appears always ‘discrete’ (1 – 2 axial steps) and almost never direct (map A-5), forming a sort of ‘rule’ governing the relationship between cultural infrastructure and the most ‘representative’ network of the cities’ open public spaces.
Conclusions
The ECOC institution contributes all the more to the broader developmental, cultural and spatial upgrading of European cities. From Athens 1985 to Thessaloniki 1997 an increasingly strong relationship has been found between cultural programs and the district, development and local plans. Thessaloniki made the boldest step in relating metropolitan and development plans to the technical plan of the ECOC, nevertheless, the results are not so evident as expected.
The analysis of the overall, as well as of the new cultural infrastructure was undertaken in order to reveal the underlying common cultural background of all cities and to indicate at the same time their probable differentiation in numbers, typologies and indicators. In plain numbers, Glasgow elaborated the most and Athens the least infrastructure, although we have to recall that the experimental start and the limited time of preparation in the case of Athens puts the city in a special position. Installations for purpose of spectacle / visiting and viewing are the leading categories, while the cities fell short in all cases with regards to their educational installations, existing or new.[6]
De-centralisation of installations and urban interventions toward the peripheral quarters, although not very explicit in their goals, are significant achievements of the institution. There, the modernist reality of European spatial planning was faced and innovative ideas applied so that the cities could acquire more humane attributes.
Within the same framework of ECOC manifestations, the discourse was inspired by the contemporary quest in the disciplines of architecture and urban design. Their preferable subjects were the upgrading and rehabilitation of historic or/and degraded buildings and urban entities, the revitalization of ‘urban voids’ and their transformation to permanent ‘nuclei of sociability’, conviviality and liveliness, along with the creation of new installations, reflecting the contemporary urban and architectural trends. In many cases the relationship between city, nature and environment was at center-stage and linked to the growing discussion about living conditions and quality of life in European cities.
The epistemological identification and application of the concept of ‘spatial syntactic identity’ in spatial configurations of four cities - ECOCs, contributed first of all to the correlation between these spatial configurations, as they used to be before the ECOC nomination. The convergences that have been noticed, verify the existence of a common cultural background, upon which urban planning/ design and architecture in European cities was based and layers added, and this naturally within a diversity constituting European multiculturalism and diversification. The divergences reveal multifaceted ‘diversity within unity’ and hence, attractiveness of these cities, as cultural entities within the European experience.
The correlation of spatial syntactic identity to the ECOC cultural installations and urban interventions also revealed their prevailing common constituents against the differentiated ones, a fact leading to the conclusion that the spatial structure of these cities was appreciated, be it unconsciously, in a similar manner through the process of installations’ allocation. Finally, there have been identified great possibilities for the improvement of this relationship, an element that could be taken up by the future cities – ECOC. It is recommended that they base their decisions for urban and / or architectural infrastructure on new concepts and new knowledge, in an attempt to relate the European / global to the local, the public to the private, the historic to contemporary, culture with “C” (top-down) to “c” (bottom-up).
Bibliography (See also Greek Bibliography in the Greek text)
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6. Encylopaedia Americana, (1976), 'Culture', vol. 8, pp. 315-318.
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[1] Thessaloniki opened the second cycle, starting from 1997.
[2] The typology is proposed in a similar content by professor A. – Ph. Lagopoulos, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
[3] The author is grateful to Mr. Sp. Merkouris for providing her with unpublished material from his own Athens 1985 records.
[4] Empirically, the public space network, that represents the spatial syntactic identity of a city, is identified with that part of the whole spatial configuration that performs simultaneously the attributes of maximum integration in the global spatial network, as well as the best possibility of intelligibility of the same network ‘without any conscious attempt’. It constitutes the quintessence of a city’s qualitative attributes that become comprehensible from its open public space. The Space syntax theory is developed in the Advanced Architectural Studies Department, The Bartlett, University College London.
[5] In fact, the absence of this correlation in Thessaloniki deprived the city of the possibility to unfold an integrated program of urban upgrading, especially in the peripheral urban quarters.
[6] It is noticed that Athens, Glasgow and Lisbon had ready the greatest part of their infrastructure, whereas Thessaloniki had almost the ¼ of its program implemented by 1997 and today, 10 years later, is implemented the 65% approx of that program.
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