Topos - Topography

In a discussion about the public and the private it is impossible to neglect the topography as a factor that generates the conditions upon which people build up societies and individual identities. The ground and the topography has always been a fundamental element in the constitution of polis and oikos not only as material artifacts but also as social entities and certainly is a vital factor in the emergence of informality. The reason is that ground escapes canonization therefore formalization is something that cannot be easily applied without the necessary modifications that are often informal. Additionally ground is the anchoring point of the materiality of oikos and the polis on the materiality of nature. In this connection the dynamics of informality are inherent, as in any kind of connection between the technical and the natural. Apart from that the ground is not merely a geometrical space but is charged with meaning, is the "commonness" but also the "property", the record of history and the signifier of it as an origin but also the territory of dominance. It is a natural basis that generates the dynamics for a smooth or sharp connection with the technical and the social and a soft or hard transition from the public to the private. The ground not only is the field of the "in betweens" where informality emerges, but additionally its topography is formative for the emergence as a process and also its output by generating certain dynamics.

An anomalous ground and a more complex topography creates different possibilities for the kind and extend of informality than a flat one but in both cases ground has certain ways of interacting with the society and activate social mechanisms because of different viewpoints, altering visibilities and orientation points that create centralities and peripheries affecting the notion of the public and private.

For example, a panoptic supervision as it is imposed by a viewpoint high over a city is often connected with the idea of centrality and the spatial accumulation of power. In his "Herostratus", Jean Paul Sartre describes the feeling of superiority someone has while looking other people from above, from a higher viewpoint. It is this ability of height to signify power that explains why palaces and castles were so often built on spots like that. But apart from concentrating and signifying the power such places have always been privileged for the development of cities. Ideal for defense against intrusions and in the same time able to function as places of gathering, as places for anticipating the surrounding landscape and for cultivating the idea of the city as polis, as a social formation, while the urban fabric was developing around them. They were called Acropolis.

On the other hand, apart from height, there in a landscape there is also depth. The cavity of the ground was always to function as place for someone to be hidden, imposing a feeling of protection, becoming a shelter or a haven which when it was extending underground was resembling Kafka's "Der Bau" adding a new layer to the city, contributing to its complexity and multiplicity.

Certainly the how informality is being connected to the topography and where is to be found is a topic in itself and needs to be investigates separately and thoroughly, but one cannot neglect that there is a connection between the ground, both as a topography and as a topos (place), and the conditions that lead to informality.

The high and the low as they are being described above is only an example to show that certain characteristics of the ground are strongly connected with the central and the peripheral, the exposed and the hidden, the public and the private. Certainly instead of the high and low one could find other features of the landscape that have similar effects, lets say in the case of the Netherlands this could be water - no water or artificial land - natural land etc. In all cases those terms are carriers of binary oppositions that are often inscribed in space, making the city a result of their continuous interrelation forming multiple horizons, orientation points and eventually several layers that contribute to the multiplicity of the cityscape and also the individual's experience of it, creating the charging that constitutes a topos, meaning "a place", a personally and subjectively experienced space. This personalization of the experience of space and eventually space itself through the notion of place where also history and memory participate is the basis of an individual identity therefore a field for the emergence of informality.

Apart from the spatial experience and the notion of place which refers to the subject and produces informality indirectly, ground is also the contributor to a spatial complexity which affects straightforward the establishment of the material borderlines or the fields in between the natural and the technical, the public and the private, the social and the personal etc, fields where formality and informality are to be found either hidden or exposed but always in constant dialogue.

To make it more tangible, often the complexity of the ground in combination with other kind of dynamics is the platform for the emergence of spatial outputs that are not even touched by any kind of technical, technological, artificial or in general formal approach or design process. In cases like these the spatial product could be the outcome of the combination of the dynamics of the topography (natural) and the mere intuition of people that built on it (technical). It is then informal per se, at least up to a certain extend, as it is the result of dynamic processes that take place in situ, on the specific landscape and in real time, by trial and error, not on blank papers and outside of the place. In these cases the "author" is not one or two, and maybe it is pointless talking about authorship because authorship is about authority and in such dynamic processes that are context specific tend to encompass so complex relations that they resemble to ecosystems where things become almost naturally through autopoesis. So, it's not about authority or control but rather about losing control, sharing authority and giving in to the dynamics of space and time. It's not about a designer looking the 2D plan from above as a superior creator who is detached from it and attempts to translate an initial idea into the representation of a praxis. It is rather about experiencing the 3D landscape and cityscape as material and social fields from their inside, sensing the dynamics and participating actively to the production of space in a way where praxis and idea come together and are in constant dialogue.