Temporal Urban Design: Temporality and Place-rhythmanalysis, an Alternative to Urban Place Aesthetics
Temporales Urban Design: Zeitlichkeit und Raum-Rhythmusanalyse, eine Alternative zur urbanen Ortsästhetik
Podcast in English: Filipa Matos Wunderlich on 19th April 2024
Informed by multiple disciplinary debates including critical theory, relativity theory and quantum physics, and musicology, Temporal Urban Design is a comprehensive new theory and methodological approach to the aesthetics of time and rhythm in the city. In this third episode of Time/Out, Filipa Matos Wunderlich shares her path to conceptualizing place-temporality and learning how to map and represent the performative aesthetic of time through rhythm in different built environments. Her thinking informs her new book published at the start of 2024, which invites urban designers and planners to think differently about urban places from a temporal perspective and refreshes the way we think about urban design and widens the framework for place design practice. Overall, it anchors the conversation on place-time, rhythm and rhythmanalysis, and offers urban designers a conceptual, analytical and practice framework. Finally, it assists with ways to communicate with others on time, and design for temporality and rhythm in urban space.
Gestützt auf interdisziplinäre Diskurse aus der Kritischen Theorie, der Relativitäts- und Quantenphysik sowie der Musikwissenschaft, stellt Temporal Urban Design eine umfassende neue Theorie und methodische Herangehensweise an die Ästhetik von Zeit und Rhythmus in der Stadt dar. In dieser dritten Episode von Time/Out berichtet Filipa Matos Wunderlich von ihrem Weg zur Konzeptualisierung von Ortszeitlichkeit und davon, wie sie lernte, die performative Ästhetik von Zeit durch Rhythmus in unterschiedlichen gebauten Umgebungen zu kartieren und darzustellen. Ihre Überlegungen fließen in ihr neues Buch ein, das Anfang 2024 erschienen ist. Es lädt Stadtgestaltende und Planende dazu ein, urbane Orte aus einer zeitlichen Perspektive neu zu denken, und verleiht dem Urban Design frische Impulse, indem es den Rahmen für ortsbezogene Gestaltungspraxis erweitert. Insgesamt verankert es das Gespräch um Ort-Zeit, Rhythmus und Rhythmusanalyse und bietet Stadtgestaltenden ein konzeptuelles, analytisches und praxisorientiertes Rahmenwerk – als Unterstützung für die Kommunikation über Zeit sowie für die Gestaltung von Zeitlichkeit und Rhythmus im urbanen Raum.
The transcript has been edited for readability.
RAC: So, welcome to Time Out at WhatNext. We are here for our third episode. This time round, we’re actually here with just two of us: myself, as well as Filipa Matos Wunderlich. I’m really excited for today’s episode because I’ve been following the work of our guest, which she will speak to in a bit, but it’s also circulating around a very specific type of time-based or temporal urban experience through rhythms. And I’d like to welcome our guest, Filipa. Thank you so much for making the time to join us today.
FMW: Thank you, Robin, for inviting me. It’s a pleasure.
RAC: Likewise. So Filipa, you’re an Associate Professor in the Urban Design program at Bartlett School of Planning at University College London. Tell us a little bit about yourself and, you know, what do you do and how is it that you’ve gotten involved in areas and interests to do with time or temporality?
FMW: Thank you. To answer the latter question, my interest in urban time, temporality and rhythm I think it just grew naturally, reflecting my interdisciplinary background. I’m an architect trained at the School of Porto, and later at the TU Delft, which I joined later to complete my studies and specialize in urban design. But I’m also a musician or a trained classical musician. And those two interests – 1) for the architecture of the city and 2) for the aesthetics of music and performativity, always ran in parallel in my life. My actual interest on temporality, rhythm and performativity and the design of cities brings these earlier interests together. Also, I practiced as an urban designer… After three and half years in practice, I sort of
felt the bug to go back to academia because I was really interested in looking at alternative ways of reading and designing for the urban environment. And I felt that based on the experience in practice, the industry was not yet ready to accommodate the kind of alternative debates and design initiatives I wanted to pursue.
Filipa M. Wunderlich 04/2024
So, I went on to write my PhD at the Bartlett, at UCL, where I am now, and have been since September 2010, which means, for 14 years, right? Writing my PhD at the Bartlett was fun, all the way, carrying that intense curiosity about the sense of time, rhythm and performativity in cities. I finished my PhD in 2009 but continued pursuing this topic after completing. My recent book topic reflects my interdisciplinary background and evolved out of studies and research debates I’m pursuing since a few years now and brings together continuing research explorations. It crystallizes the debate on Temporal Urban Design, including an alternative approach to the way we think about design of places and cities as well as how one needs to practice for it, from temporal and rhythmic perspective.
RAC: Yes. And thank you for that great introduction about your trajectory into not only your personal experiences with time, temporality, but how you’re also now translating this into your latest publication, Temporal Urban Design, Temporality, Rhythm and Place. So, this has also just recently come out. It’s now available in hard copy as well. I’m really curious about it. Tell us more about how your intentions and your translations allow the reader to understand and emphasise on experience in relation to place-temporality. Experiences have been very broadly introduced in the context of our podcast. So, we had a first episode looking at in terms of more structured experiences through exhibitions. You’re referring to the everyday experiences that we tend to underestimate. With regards to place-temporality, you refer specifically in your work – “place-temporality is to time what character is to place”. And it’s also a key point in understanding how you both approach, but also understand individual and maybe collective, I guess, experiences for rhythm. Could you paint us a picture of the initial experiences that compelled you to start working and writing on, or towards this time, you call it a timespace approach to urban design?
FMW: Ok, first, I often exercise being in place or in urban places. As an architect I was trained to notice buildings, thresholds, all that is visual, all that is formal around me, all that I could touch. But invaded by that bug of performativity and music,
I have always been more interested in how people performed in urban spaces, their recurrent performances and how meaningful they were, also, what kind of stage set I was supposed to be drawing to accommodate these practices. In other words, what were the performative narratives to design for. And that interest has grown over the years.
Filipa M. Wunderlich 04/2024
Second, as a European nomad, with experiences of moving to and from multiple cosmopolitan and country environments, I often caught myself thinking on what makes this city or place feel faster than others. Living in a small city like Delft, as a student, and then experiencing big complex cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam, Paris and London, where I came later to live, was revealing. There was a striking difference in how I sensed time and how I performed in those cities.
And for me, there was a link between its socio-spatial aesthetics, the unique temporal experience, and the performance patterns that defined it.
Filipa M. Wunderlich 04/2024
Another thing linked to differences of speed were sensorial and affect differences. So, about fast places, people often said, oh, it’s a very stressful, it’s an agitated city, it’s a complex environment. And about slow places, they seem to be very regulated, clearly easy to understand. So at this stage I asked – what is this kind of aesthetics that is related to sense of time and movement.
So, I was driven by the curiosity of what makes fast and what makes slow, what influences this. And the question whether the built environment disciplines have a role to play on this, and if yes, what does that means for the way to think about design and how can one specifically, design for senses of time, place-temporality and rhythm in cities. I wanted to dig more into these questions. The first stage of this work was about trying to unpack what were then the attributes, either physical or social attributes, or indeed from nature, that influenced that sense of time. And as I dug into the literature and the academic debates, I quickly became interested in the narratives on urban performativity by Nigel Thrift (1996, 2003) and others, but also, I encountered the concepts of duration and rhythm as the architecture of time by Bergson (1927) and Bachelard (1950), respectively, discussed between these authors, in very different and nuanced manners, sometimes agreeing, sometimes not.
Filipa M. Wunderlich 04/2024
But I found other interesting discourses, as I dug into urban geography debates, where the concept of rhythm appeared repeatedly. But one thing I noticed – that the way the researchers were looking at or talking about rhythm was often not different from the way they talk about pattern or they would talk about repetition. So, discourses were very convoluted and fairly unclear in terms of their reference to concepts of time, temporality, rhythm and pattern.
And then when I was in my second year of researching on the topic, the English edition for Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis book came out. Obviously, that was a big event in the sense that it resonated and supported a lot of the work already done, and I then proceeded to elaborate more on and crystallize it through fieldwork. But again, even in Lefebvre’s discourses on rhythm, they were always analogies to music, analogies to the performative art forms, as in theatre, dance, and so on; but it these analogies were not explored in any depth. So, I really wanted to understand more.
Filipa M. Wunderlich 04/2024
Obviously, at that point, my background as a musician and my interest in musicology helped driving the research forward towards understanding more of what is and what makes rhythm and the aesthetics of urban performativity.
It seemed to me at that point, including in research seminar debates with colleagues in urban studies and other disciplines, that there was a gap between perspectives. I felt, supported by my music and performative arts background, I had more to add. So, I started working on the analogy between the aesthetics of music and rhythm more specifically and that of urban environment. This was a fascinating interface and realm of studies to unpack and later transfer knowledge from.
Filipa M. Wunderlich 04/2024
But I think, going back to your question, which I think I’ve diverted slightly from, my fascination was in thinking ‘places as art forms’, and ‘places as defined by practices and events and how these unfolded rhythmically to shape narratives’, and overall place-performances. Place- narratives and performances have a meaningful impact on people, as they embody these narratives and performances as urban dwellers. They also experience and co-produce places. At this point I usually like to bring this comparison of what design is for me or how I understand it:
That of a theatre play. In a theatre play, in urban space, you have the narratives shaped and revealed by performance practices, and places stories unfold. That is for me, the real urban design – the urban place-design I talk about in my book. The physical architecture of places are not but the mere stage set where the actual urban design of places unfold. This kind of design aesthetics is sensorial, performative, affective and meaningful in public spaces. It also defines temporal identity, sense of place-time and overall temporality.
Filipa M. Wunderlich 04/2024
So, from here, what then defines temporality? This key question guiding research. So, I pursued this question whilst doing extensive work in various different places in London places. I really wanted to understand what defines the temporal aesthetic of places. And if rhythm is then the architecture of time, as Bachelard wrote, it must play a big role in how time expresses itself and represents itself in the space. I look at place-temporality as an experiential aesthetics; places have a distinct sense of duration, shaped by rhythmic events. In a sense,
place-temporality is not an intellectual abstraction. It’s not an intellectual concept. You feel it when you are involved in the place. And it depends on you being involved with all your senses. Sound and the haptic senses are just as important as the visual.
Filipa M. Wunderlich 04/2024
In a sense, the stage set is important, but it’s just as important as the narratives and the stories and the performances that are unfolding in it. Place-temporality is sensorial, performative and affective. So, it’s a meaningful process from which we develop a link to places. I hope that sort of paints a picture of how I think about places and how I define place. Place-temporality for me is a quality experience, is a sense of atmosphere, a sense of temporal beauty. And for me, as a curious researcher, the challenge was to unpack what shapes it and how does it look? Here, rhythm, as the architecture of time, was an absolute key element to focus on.
RAC: Yes, that’s a very rich introduction to your own personal, I guess, affinity for the delicate nuances of broader timespaces that you’ve gone through, traveled through. And this development of the capacity to understand place beyond just the physical and the surficial objects or edges that we see and rather see it as a very sensorial – not see it, but feel it, smell it, hear it, and interact with, but also shape it. So yeah, thank you for that introduction. It provides a very rich picture as to how you understand it. And I think it encourages me, at least what I take away is a very welcoming, almost teasing encouragement to think about place, not just as these static or very dead in a sense, physical surfaces or facades that we pass by, but rather as living and to some extent resonating materialities that afford us the opportunity to not only move or function or do things and activities in space, but really to also feel it at a deeper level when we allow it to, right? Or when we allow ourselves to actually take in the magnitude of the experiences there. I also take away that it also means you try to encourage us or the readers to understand that if we allow ourselves to take that time and see that space and feel that space and interact with it differently, we’ll get a much different perspective, which we up until now have not quite had the language or the notation to be able to make visible and communicate. This is what you do through your work in essence. And so in a sense, it’s really fascinating to see how you’ve gone through that type of dialogue and multiple, I guess, interactions with not just only space and place, but also other writers and thinkers and have realized for yourself that there’s not quite that place for you to carry out the type of conversation or that quality of exchange that you want at a deeper level. And so in that sense, it’s really interesting to see how you uncover a different type of understanding with regards to place and how that relates with time through rhythms. You also unpack not just that experience that you personally wanted to share, but also how writers and thinkers up to date have taken on a very specific type of tranche or cascade of thinking about time through duration and through very rigid structures. And then later on were made available through translations. To what extent do you think that your work is a product or maybe something very different? Or I guess, to what extent do you want to position yourself differently from some of these ways of thinking about time as we understand it embedded in place and a diverse range of spaces? Or which new type of thinking would you like to bring in or compel your readers or other scholars or practitioners to think about in order to be able to either integrate rhythm and temporal urban design into their work or in their way of life? So that’s actually, I’m being a bit mean here. There’s actually two questions in that one there.
FMW: To the first question, one thing that I explored to start with is what are others were saying about the urban sense of time. It was certainly necessary for me to understand that concept in much more depth, what others in theory and philosophy over time and more recently have said about the sense of time and experience of time. Also others, in human geography and social studies, environmental psychology. For me,
it was really important to see what philosophy and the natural sciences and the social sciences were saying about the experience of time and the experience of rhythm, yet also about other aspects such as that of urban performativity and mobility. I’m supported by those discourses and findings, and my research evolves from there.
Filipa M. Wunderlich 04/2024
Understandings of, for example, space-time, and timespace in quantum physics, really enlightened me about the nature of temporal reality. The work of Carlo Rovelli ‘The order of Time’ (2019) supports my observations of ‘place’. Also, the work of Mimi Sheller ‘From spatial turn to mobilities turn’ (2017), is really interesting, namely, her focus on micro-mobilities of the body and how the sensuous geographies of movement, affect and dwelling are so relevant to engage with, if we want to understand the city in a deeper way. I’ve also observed those terms in debates of how one talks about the city, like, in human geography signaling a spatial turn, with Doreen Massey, ‘For Space’ (2005) and Nigel Thrift, TimeSpace: geographies of temporality (2001). I was fascinated by what these authors were writing about. Yet I also observed that whilst my colleagues, and myself included, in architecture, urban design and in the planning field, found those discourses very interesting, we didn’t know what to do with it in our field. It was so abstract. We didn’t know how to touch it. Yes, they were talking about urban temporalities and performativity and the non-representational dimension, and so on…but what does that tell about places and how does that all play in respect to design? From me it was about harvesting from those interdisciplinary debates and transferring them into my field of studies, the urban design field, urban place design, thinking about place, thinking about what makes a neighbourhood. So, it was about transferring knowledge as to evolve urban design practice. And obviously as part of that process, I needed to innovate because there was a gap in vocabulary, what we talked about what we focused on was very different. Also, it was important to demonstrate the value of focusing on time, and spending time defining place-temporality and rhythm and exploring it analytically and more tangibly in a way that it suits the built environment disciplines. Designers needed to understand how to work with this topic of time and rhythm. Methodologically there was a huge gap there too. Typically, urban designers and spatial planners are primarily focused on the visual and studio paperwork, it’s quite limiting the way we work, and has an impact on the way we talk and think about spaces. Established methodologies, and here I’m talking about representations like the ground figure map, the elevation, hand sketches, or so. Urban design needs to widen its methodological scope if we want to approach the topic of rhythm and temporality in the city and indeed impact and design for it in the future. This is the big objective of the work. Keen external interest, in collaborative projects and keynotes and presentations kept me going and still keeps me going in a sense. But so, this particular work responds to and is supported by work in other disciplines, even if their focus and aim is different from mine.
RAC: Yes, no, definitely. I do see, and it’s become clear how it’s a response, not just a simple reaction. The mission is to create also the tools and the language and the semantics necessary to be able to make visual and clear an urban design understanding of what are all these other scholars and thinkers talk about.
FMW: I remember sitting in a lecture of Beatriz Colomina, possibly 10 or 15 years ago, where she emphasized the fact that,
we need to know and build upon what the natural sciences and the theorists of allied disciplines are saying. Her view was that architecture and design and planning is always lagging behind. The book addresses that by situating the research in the first two chapters and responding to findings on time and rhythm.
Filipa M. Wunderlich 04/2024
RAC: Yes, I think you do a fantastic job of bridging this and developing by providing that not just the method and the methodology, but really a visualization, a communication, a set of communication kind of tools really. So you with a complete place for the analytical framework and then also a specific set of notation.
FMW: This was in response to the main research aim, so how do we approach it.
So, if we want to work with a topic, sense of time and rhythm in the urban environment, how do we understand it and apply it? How do we map it, and how do we represent it? With place-rhythmanalysis, I offer a very comprehensive offer of a variety of tools of data collection, but also a variety of modes of representation that urban designers, planners and architects can pick and choose from as they try and approach temporality, and work with the aesthetic rhythm in urban spaces.
Filipa M. Wunderlich 04/2024
RAC: You’ve highlighted through your explanations what we risk losing out on if we don’t take the chance to understand that there is a tangible and material sense of time in these places, but also felt and embodied sense that we can actually represent and visualize and translate into a notation form or communicated form that is very clear. A few last questions: What do you think that you would recommend readers to either prepare or to bring to the table in order to understand what it is that you have to offer in your book to them? Or, what is it that they could think about first before they can start reading your book and thinking about temporal urban design so that they can comprehend it and not be confused by it? How can they enable themselves to go out into their own practice or everyday experiences of the world and apply it effectively?
FMW: I think first thing is curiosity really, I mean –
if you’re a practitioner or researcher that is open to widen up the scope of how you understand the urban environment, then this is the book for you. The book builds on different disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates and offers an alternative or complementary approach to the way we currently and mostly commonly understand and design for urban places.
Filipa M. Wunderlich 04/2024
I would find it difficult to say what you need to know before. I think it’s rather about whether you have, whether you’re interested or whether you have that curiosity to expand the way you think about or even challenge the way you think about design. Perhaps one thing I could say is, going back to the 60s or the 70s,
one of the things urban design claims to be doing and wants to do is design for people, right? Somehow though, I feel a sense of frustration… if urban design actually wants to understand people from within, then we must understand community rhythms, people’s social rhythms of living and relationship, and even how their biological rhythms impact on their dwelling patterns in cities and places. If we want to design for people or ecologies in place, then we ought to understand what they do on an everyday basis and temporally.
Filipa M. Wunderlich 04/2024
We’ve advanced a lot in terms of research on the matter, namely with the work of researchers like Jan Gehl which has had an immense impact in the way we think and design for cities today, as well as Mark Francis and the Project for Public Spaces in New York, and others over the years. But it’s almost as if the outcome of this work we are showered with a lot of normative prescriptions and quick generalizations of how one needs to design for people, whoever they are, whomever they are and wherever they are. What I am trying to say, is that, if you want truly to design for people, then you ought to understand how they live in dialogue with nature and places, engaging with its architecture, temporally and rhythmically.
And we haven’t spoken about that yet, this book and this approach to the sense of time and rhythm in urban places, comes in the context of real new conditions and challenges in the cities today, some of which haven’t been so prominent before.
RAC: No, definitely.
FMW: In that context, that book tries to go yet a step further to understand places as bundles of meaningful relationships, meaningful events, meaningful performances, as meaningful ecologies. This discourse on temporality and rhythm in urban space and its relevance for design, people and cities, tries to sort of turn things on its head and be, in a sense, radical in the way it reads urban place-design, with the aim to steer debate and widen up thinking about environments.
RAC: Having gone through your book, I do agree that it does encourage and invite us to turn things around. And it definitely does give us effective ways to make sense of and visualize how places can be understood differently. But I think the most important thing that I’d like to perhaps close on as we slowly wrap up here is your encouragement to be curious and the curiosity that we take into our own experiences in the diverse spaces we move through, the places we might dwell in or value or identify with, to really understand and value our own sensation for rhythms and how they’re linked there, and also the sources of rhythms. And I think right now, even as we transition, I mean, it’s end of April, we’re transitioning into summer, and you can also note the changes in daylight and how the season is extending the daylight hours or how it’s changing also ecological cycles, with plants coming into bloom. There’s a sense of, yeah, there’s a real temporal sensitivity that is there and that enhances how we experience the environment – natural and built around us. And so, I think that maybe I will encourage our listeners to take that away as our final closing…
FMW: And how each locality is unique, each environment you’re looking at has its own rhythmicity, its own performative rhythmic patterns, which are very, very unique. And it’s about looking at those relationships between the rituals of people and the cycles of nature and how they interact with each other, and from there decide what needs enhancement and what needs designing for. And then respond contextually, with what could be a physical and a visual prop, but it could also be an initiative or a strategy. Again, widen up and innovate. I think there’s an opportunity here to widen the scope of and innovate in practice and how we respond to places in a different way. One important note is that urbanization is moving incredibly fast and the way our cities are shaping up through persistent beliefs on growth development is actually somewhat harming us. There can be quite pleasant environments, but on the whole, research confirming this is coming forward in the world of neuropsychology or neuropsychiatry and health. You know, we’re seeing ever more unsustainable processes for growth development; we’re experiencing time-space compression which many renowned geographers have written about it in the early 90s. We’re losing the sensorial attachment to cities. Finally, mental health concerns amongst urban dwellers is rising and we now know that it’s to do with the way our physical and social environments are shaped. So, these challenges are hardly being attended by design, but we are being pressed to act upon them. So, you know, these are pressing issues that I think, that reason the widening of the scope of how we understand design. It justifies opening the scope and looking at places in a different way, and so that we can reach out in multifaceted way, by design, in a way with either initiatives and strategies and products alike in a more effective manner to deal with those acute urban challenges. In this book, Temporal Urban Design is about the curatorship of cities and places and here I talk about regenerative design. A design movement in the context of future planning realms and dimensions such as that of post-growth and de-growth of cities. Temporal Urban Design is a way of looking meticulously and in nuanced temporally contextual manner to urban places and cities. We need to move forward, open up understandings, and with it, innovate methodologically, to be able to react to those more pressing issues that go beyond form.
RAC: Those are valuable contextual notes to add because they will have a lasting effect on how we plan in the future or design or experience in the future. So it’s very timely, recommendation and encouragement and maybe even warning for us, especially those involved in the shaping of the built and the lived experiences and environments. Thank you for taking the time today to share your experiences and the process that shaped your work and your thinking, and for encouraging us to be curious. I look forward to being able to use your book in other contexts of teaching and research. And I hope others do too.
FMW: Thank you so much for the invitation. It’s very valuable to be able to reach out to different communities of researchers and practitioners through this means.
RAC: So, there you have it for episode three, listening to Filipa Matos Wunderlich and her speak on an experience-oriented understanding of temporal urban design.
References
- Bachelard, G. (1950). La dialectique de la durée. Presses Universitaires de France. (https://www.puf.com/la-dialectique-de-la-duree-0)
- Bergson, H. (1927). Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. Presses Universitaires de
- France. (https://www.puf.com/essai-sur-les-donnees-immediates-de-la-conscience)
- Thrift, N. J. (1996). Spatial formations. Sage.
- Thrift, N. J. (2003). Performance and .…. Environment and Planning A, 35(11), 2019-2024. https://doi.org/10.1068/a3543a (Original work published 2003)
Filipa Matos Wunderlich is Associate Professor in Urban Design at the Bartlett School of Planning, at University College London (UCL) in the UK. Her key research interests and writing focus is on the temporal dimension of urban place design, including place-temporality, rhythm and place-rhythmanalysis, also, the temporal heritage(s) in everyday life, walking as a methodological practice, and gender-sensitive urban design. Filipa is author of the book ‘Temporal Urban Design: Temporality, Rhythm and Place’, 2024 (for Routledge) and co-authored book ‘Capital Spaces: The Multiple Complex Public Spaces of a Global City’, 2012 (for Routledge). She is the Director of the Master in Research (MRes) in Interdisciplinary Urban Design at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London.