EDITORIAL

RUANG


SPACE


URBAN DESIGN - THE CASE OF BALI

By: Alexander R. Cuthbert 1

In my last Ruang editorial, I described urban design as ‘the synthesis discipline’. In the absence of Urban Design education and practice, both architecture and planning are seriously handicapped across the board. This is currently the situation in Bali as a whole and Denpasar in particular. Yet the prevailing opinion is that one half of urban design (regulation) is owned by planning, the other half (design) is owned by architecture. How can we be so wrong? The answer is that for decades scholars and professionals have been unable to theorize the difference in each case, so antiquated ideas rule (Cuthbert 2007). I offer a small diagram from one of my books to clarify this issue and hope it is axiomatic that urban design has greater integrity than the other environmental disciplines (Cuthbert 2015). The debate hinges around the concept that to be scientific a discipline must have either a real object or a theoretical object (Castells 1977). I argue that Urban Design is the only environmental discipline that has both and is stronger for it.

Table 1. Theoretical Object of Disciplines in the Built Environment related Field

DISCIPLINE

ARCHITECTURE

URBAN DESIGN

LANDSCAPE

ARCHITECTURE

URBAN

PLANNING

  • 1.    THEORETICAL OBJECT

  • 2.    REAL OBJECT

?

THE INDIVIDUAL

BUILDING

CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE PUBLIC REALM

PUBLIC SPACE

?

?

?

?

We can then see that public space and spatial typologies are a central vector of urban design theory (not architecture or planning) and in order to retreat from the sterile descriptors of land use planning, Ed Soja defined three key spatial forms -Firstspace (material space), Secondspace, (the spaces of representation) and Thirdspace, (the lived spaces of representation, Soja 1996). His ‘Thirdspace, journeys to Los Angeles and other imagined places’ extends Henri Lefebvre’s original concepts into a larger framework (see Lefebvre 1974 pp 38-39). Arjun Appadurai has also suggested spatial typologies that reflect global cultural flows – ethnoscapes (the environments of specific interest groups), mediascapes (landscapes of images), technoscapes (the global configuration of places through technologies) financescapes (spaces of global capital), and ideoscapes (ideologies of states and their counter-movements). So it is revealing that leaving building types and land use

1


categories behind by jumping out of the limiting box of professionalism generates unique ways of looking at space.

We then need to ask, ‘How do we adequately represent Balinese spatial practices in the age of globalization? Using the New Urban Design principles (see last editorial), we must first identify typologies of social practice that reflect evolving social structures before appropriate typologies of form and space can be discussed. These can be defined functionally by using basic economic processes – production, consumption, exchange, and administration, adding what Castells calls ‘the urban symbolic’ (Castells 1977). But we can also adapt Appadurai’s basic concept of urban ‘scapes’ to Bali - Ethnoscapes that are configured by vernacular culture; Ideoscapes configured by state ideology, Globalscapes configured by tourism and neo-corporatism, Greenscapes of nature, and the invisible Technoscapes of the internet with its new tribal communities. These will overlap in complex ways, producing more refined spaces and places (Cuthbert 2013). Typologies of urban and architectural form then need to be completely rethought to merge with the needs of 2040, not 18th century Bali. Time to move forward and the challenge is how to do it.

References

Appadurai, A. (2000). Globalization – The Reader. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. Pp 92-100. London: Athlone.

Castells, M. (1977). The Urban Question. London: Arnold. See Chapter 8 ‘The Debate on the Theory of Space’.

Cuthbert, A. R. (2007). Urban Design: Requiem for an era – review and critique of the last 50 years. Urban Design International. 12, 177-223. (Whole issue, 46pp).

Cuthbert, A. R. (2012) Paradise lost, sanity gained - towards a critical Balinese urbanism. Journal Kajian Bali. 2(1), pp. 1- 40.

Cuthbert, A. R. (2013). The New Urban Design – a Social Theory of Architecture? China Architecture Review. Chungching. Pp 26-40.

Cuthbert, A.R. (2013). Venacular Transfomations: Context, Isues, Debates. In G. A. M. Suartika (Ed.), Vernacular Transformations (pp. 7-39). Denpasar: Pustaka Larasan and Udayana University's Program.

Cuthbert, A. R. (2017). Urban Design. The Wiley- Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory. London. Wiley- Blackwell.

Lefebvre, H. (1974). The Production of Space, English translation by Donald, Nicholson-Smith (1991), with afterword by David Harvey. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell Ltd.

Soja, E. Thirdspace (1996). Journeys to Los Angeles and other and other imagined places. London: Wiley.

Suartika, G.A.M. (2013). Vernacular Transformations. Denpasar: Pustaka Larasan and Udayana University's Program.

Suartika G.A.M. Zerby, J.Z. and Cuthbert (2018). The Doors of perception to space-timemeaning: ideology, religion and aesthetics in Balinese development. Space and Culture 21(4) 340-358.

116

SPACE - VOLUME 6, NO. 2, OCTOBER 2019