9 Implementation

The shape of public space needs to be taken as seriously as the shapes of buildings, but this is very hard to implement, because our present consciousness focuses more easily on building-volumes than on spaces.

How can we visualize and agree on what we want to build?

Codes and systems of rules are unlikely ever to be enough. They are too abstract, too conceptual. They seek to be general — in the hope of creating a framework of order in which genuine freedom can exist. But in fact they do not say enough about the space, and do not guarantee the emergence of shaped space with genuine deep feeling — hence life.
This means that plans like zoning ordinances and master plans cannot be enough. They are not physical enough, they do not describe the attributes or necessities of living space, they do not insist with sufficient force and artistic clarity on the actual shape of space. What is needed to support the individual acts of construction that make up the life of the town, is a three-dimensional diagram of the actual shape of the needed space.
A very physical document of the positive space — more physical even than a model — which shows in great detail the connections, shape, subtlety and physical presence of the space which is to be created, the interlock of spaces, the flow of space.

Once we have this diagram — it is an understanding, and agreement, a vision, which each player is then to help embody.

A major change; this process requires wide acceptance, throughout society, of an attitude in which transportation engineers have secondary — not primary — control over the shaping of roads. Transportation engineers must make their work on cars subsidiary to the work which defines the pedestrian hulls as places which people can use, and own.

In an unfolded world we find that all living structure is anchored by a hierarchy of circulation and living rooms. The common living rooms are shaped by buildings, by the exterior volumes of buildings. Every space that exists is either a public space, which is a hull, or a private space which forms a positive and useful garden.

We ask, then, that each player makes a contribution to this growing whole.
We cannot legislate this. Rules, laws, restrictions, are too exact, too restrictive. Instead we ask that each individual actor think about it, work within it, contribute to it.

What we understand is a scheme of wholes. The remaining acts of construction are then to be like brush strokes, which will gradually complete the painting. We know that some brush strokes, by virtue of their feeling, or their force, will themselves transform the vision of the whole. Still, though, it is the whole which is being conceived, like a sculpture of living space.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/3 The hulls of public space#