City-craft
City-craft is a composite term referring to properties of urban form, spatial relations, and the multiple processes that bring them about including their transformation over time.
City-craft refers to how the city is ‘crafted’ by local actions which, with time, through a gradual process of accretion have global-scale effects. From extending a road to provide access to a plot to driving a larger artery through a city, city-craft concerns the collective engagement with urban operations gradually generating the city as a whole.
City-craft is a term coined by Sophia Psarra [1], Reader of Architecture and Spatial Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture [2], University College London, in her latest book, The Venice Variations: Tracing the Architectural Imagination published by UCL Press (2018) [3].
Criteria[edit]
City-craft comes about when people actively engage with city-making processes without either conscious awareness of the rules of engagement or a pre-existing idea about the outcome of these processes, or both.
Craft[edit]
‘Craft’ in city-craft analogically refers to skilled workmanship and those cultural processes that are not recorded or transmissible through verbal or other kinds of representational records. Yet such processes and work persist, becoming transmissible from generation to generation through existing traditions and word of mouth.
Applications[edit]
City-craft was the title of the first chapter of architect Sophia Psarra’s book The Venice Variations, describing Venice’s urban form as a record of evolution since the origin of Venice in the archipelago. The analysis of Venice using spatial network analysis showed that the squares of Venice are all interconnected through a pervasive network of betweenness centrality [4] at all scales of the analysis. This pattern captures the transformation of Venice from semi-autonomous parish communities arranged around a square with a church and a well for water collection to an urban complex. It indicates that as islands were joined to form the compact form of the city, the bridges that were built connected the squares with each other, producing a network of multiple interconnected centralities.
See Also[edit]
The foundational ground for this work is research conducted by Bill Hillier, Julienne Hanson [5] [6] and their colleagues at UCL.
References[edit]
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