Community - Community Space

Community and community space are closely related – this is what we have come to conclude after brainstorming over the case of King Street at the Pécs workshop of Urban Ideas Bakery. [1] A properly functioning community space presupposes a properly functioning community, which is able to formulate its claims regarding the space and actively contribute to its creation and maintenance. Furthermore, this is an interactive process, during which the community and the space they occupy evolve hand in hand, while the space becomes a defining factor of the community’s identity. In this relationship the community gradually exceeds the role of passive consumer of the space, becoming its manager and developer because they consider it their own. In this reading, public space development means not the development of the physical environment and not even that of the community, but the improvement of their relationship.

KING STREET, PÉCS

The dramatic devaluation of King Street on Pécs’s “public space market” can be traced back to the same system of relations. Apparently there are two competing cultures of cooperation on the market of public space consumers: on the one hand, traditional public spaces created by the cooperation of the civil community and the local government representing it; on the other hand, “pseudo-public spaces” engendered by the cooperation of the civil society and the market[2].

Apparently the civil society’s and the local government’s culture of cooperation has limited or no capacity for keeping pace with the consumer / user / manager civil community’s emerging demands regarding the once lustrous old shopping street. First of all, the local government’s formal culture of development is ignorant of the community’s claims emerging in relation to King Street, and is unwilling to involve the actors in the development process. Secondly, the civil society’s demands or interests are difficult to grasp on account of their shortcomings in terms of cooperation and organisation, and they are unable to assert these as real partners of the local government. Not only do the organisational and institutional shortcomings of the two parties pose a problem, but the cultural conditions for the cooperation are also inadequate.

It also appears that while market mechanisms are able to mobilise stable financial and organisational resources for the development and management of their “quasi-public spaces”, the informal organisations of the dissipated community of Pécs provide only a limited organisational and financial basis for a public space development process. Moreover, the financial and organisational base of the local government’s formal organisational culture provides little support in this regard.

As a result, in the case of several actual development projects, the citizens of Pécs don’t consider these traditional community spaces their own, using them less and in different ways than conceived by the development plans, and also devoting less care to their maintenance and improvement. The structural and organisational discrepancy that has arisen between the public space and the public on the levels of use, management and development, reproduces the conflict, which is perceivably manifested in the public space. This degrades the competitiveness of King Street, as well as central public spaces fulfilling traditional community functions in general, as opposed to “quasi-public spaces” that employ market strategies to position themselves much more sensitively to match the needs of groups of specific social functions.

BOTTOM-UP / TOP-DOWN VIEWS OF A CONFLICT 

This spatial and communal discrepancy has a number of interesting and, in terms of finding a solution, important readings. Each approach endeavours to represent some kind of concordance of spatial and communal phenomena, an interpretation that crystallises a proposal for a solution. Each figure (including the ones above) therefore inevitably presupposes an innovative visualisation of the information at hand; not only because of the social, economic and political tension as well as the disparity of their spatial views [3], but also owing to the constantly changing point of view assumed by interpretation and development. In addition to developing the language of imparting information, this visualisation process is a means of producing information / knowledge.

The viewpoints have been examined from two aspects, comprising two different methodological approaches. The macro-view involved a fundamentally deductive way of thinking in exploring the situation of King Street on the basis of the functional discrepancies of the prevailing system. The micro-views involved an inductive approach, regarding the functional discrepancies of King Street through the point of view of the actors. Both aspects are indispensable for complete transparency. On the one hand, because macro-scale models are based on the cultural regularities of micro-scale phenomena; on the other hand, because these cultural foundations are rather plastic in a society under such intense transformation as Hungary, including Pécs, causing a high probability of distortion in case of a macro-approach.

MACRO

King Street in the spatial-functional system of the texture of the city

Since the political transition in 1989, the “public space market” has undergone considerable transformation as regards King Street.

The first significant event in this transformation was the appearance of the “quasi-public space” of the ÁRKÁD shopping centre in 2004, in the immediate vicinity of the historic city centre. Exploiting the advantage and superiority of the commercial “quasi-public space” as well as the weak spots of the shopping street (lack of parking, public transport and management; seasonality), it forced Pécs’s once lustrous but now languid shopping street into a competitive disadvantage. The coup de grace to the street’s commercial function have been the erratic introduction of parking fees and the lagging public space development projects, ignorant of the everyday functioning of the city.

A theoretical opportunity for breakout would have been to interlink the new development zones of the Capital of Culture (ECC) project, the city centre and the western campus of the university into a unified spatial system. The functions of the ECC projects involving the city centre and the university could be organised into a synergic system linking and complementing the three zones by relatively simple means. In this relation, besides the Martyrs of Arad Road circumventing the historic city centre to the north and the Zsolnay – Rákóczi Streets to the south, a significant role would be imparted on King Street, the main east-west axis of the city centre. This would have come in handy in giving impetus to the eastern end of King Street, which now gradually dies away after losing integrity towards Wheat Square.

This, however, has only sporadically been achieved by the current project: public space developments have been realised only in connection with key projects, to reinforce their synergy. The pedestrian shopping street still doesn’t curve towards the Knowledge Centre and the Concert Hall, and access to the Zsolnay Cultural Centre still requires a map and a great deal of perseverance. With the highest traffic in Pécs, Zsolnay Road bisects rather than connects the city centre.

MICRO

This analytical approach has focused on the groups of actors for whom King Street was of concern, with special regard to how these actors saw the situation and problems of the deteriorating street, as well as the causes of this. It has also explored the services offered by the street to each of these actors, and what they were missing; also how and to what extent they exploited the physical and functional capacities of the street. We hoped that certain facts and aspects which we considered evident – and which were the premises of our macro-scale statements – would be enriched, confirmed, slightly adjusted, or even refuted.

King Street on the mental map of public space users

In this case, a mental map can do more than visualise a community’s apprehension of a physical space and its usage patterns; through the latter it also indicates the level of success of the cooperation between the civils and the local government regarding the King Street area. Responding consumers mark places of interest on the map in terms of spatial use and functionality: the figure accurately indicates the discrepancies of the aforementioned cooperation.

The maps lead us to conclude that presently King Street functions as a cul-de-sac rather than a street in the classical sense. It is difficult to predict today how this situation will be influenced by the scheduled public space developments and the new “cultural quarter” intended as an Eastern expansion of the city centre.

[1] http://creativecities.britishcouncil.org/urban_ideas_bakery/event/urban_ideas_bakery_in_pecs

[2] It is worthwhile to make a distinction between public spaces founded on community resources and culture, serving traditional civil community functions, and ones founded on market resources and culture, serving economic goals.

[3] Cf.. Bill Hillier (1996) Space is the machine. Hillier’s model has certain limitations as regards the actual mapping of reality; as Bill Hillier writes: “…it is likely that the designer’s predictions will refer only to an illusory reality”.