Finding Lost Space: Theories of Urban Design

Roger L. Trancik

1986. Wiley. 256 pp. $95.

Before there was smart growth, new urbanism, or a downtown Renaissance, there was “lost space.” Landscape architect Roger Trancik’s 1986 book revolves around this rather plaintive phrase — characteristic of a time of transition, when the gods of modernism still had to be propitiated even as new ones were being painfully born. Trancik described how modernists “abandoned principles of urbanism and the human dimension of outdoor space established in the urban design of cities of the past,” with bad results, but then felt it necessary to add: “in criticizing the form of the modern city, the intention is not to imply that the architecture and urban design of the last half-century has been an utter failure.” {10-11} This would come as news to a later generation of architects and planners who show little hesitation in using the term as a dismissive insult.

The book’s final chapter remains a good introduction to the basics of good urban design. Besides listing five principles of design and four steps in the design process, the author enumerates six close-to-the-ground guidelines for the actual work:

(1) maintain continuity of the street wall,
(2) respect the existing silhouette of buildings and landscape,
(3) prevent building masses that are out of scale,
(4) match and/or complement materials,
(5) respect existing rhythms of facades and spatial elements, and
(6) enhance patterns of public space usage.

Nothing to quarrel with here, although today we might want to say more, or differently, or more specifically.

Yet in other ways, at the ripe old age of 23, this book is already part of history, and no less interesting for that. Of course the case studies (Boston, Washington DC, Göteborg, and Newcastle) are dated. More interestingly, the thought process is unusually explicit because it was taking place during an in-between time. Finding Lost Space is not the Summa of a mature doctrine; it’s a journey in which the author seems to be picking his way with some care, almost thinking out loud, returning again and again to make another run at the book’s central question: What exactly is “lost space”?

The definition changes and shifts chapter by chapter. At first Trancik defines the phrase by enumerating examples. Lost space, he says, is “the leftover unstructured landscape at the base of high-rise towers….the surface parking lots….the no-man’s-lands along the edges of freeways that nobody cares about maintaining, much less using….abandoned waterfronts, train yards, vacated military sites, and industrial complexes….vacant blight-clearance sites….residual areas between districts….deteriorated parks and marginal public-housing projects that have to be rebuilt because they do not serve their intended purpose.” {3}

So far this definition sounds more like a manifesto — “These are bad things, here I stand, come join me.” And if you can draw a big enough crowd, a manifesto doesn’t need a lot of explaining or justifying. But somehow in 1986 the manifesto still seemed to need some supporting argument. So the author took another tack: “Generally speaking, lost spaces are the undesirable urban areas that are in need of redesign — antispaces, making no positive contribution to the surroundings or users.” {3-4}

But of course this begs the question: Who says they’re “undesirable” or “in need of redesign”? Why isn’t parking a “positive contribution”? Trancik is trying to say something, to make a feeling explicit, yet when he does so he falls back on the seemingly self-evident nature of that feeling.

Later on he cites Steven Peterson, who had described “space as conceivable and antispace [lost space] as inconceivable volume. Space can be measured; it has definite and perceivable boundaries; it is discontinuous in principle, closed, static, yet serial in composition. Antispace, on the other hand, is shapeless, continuous, lacking perceivable edges of form. The Piazza del Campo, Siena is space, while…the Las Vegas strip” is antispace. {61} But again, who is doing the conceiving? And who is unable to measure the Las Vegas strip? Surely it’s still a definite number of feet from the front door of one casino to the next.

And what about parks and the countryside? Trancik calls them “soft space,” exempting them from Peterson’s strictures, and adds, “As a meaningful space with a distinct use and clear purpose, rural space, although architecturally unenclosed, is not lost space. Enclosure of rural space is derived from natural features of topography and land form, water, vegetation in the form of hedgerows, forests, and plantations, as well as manmade enclosures of fences and stone walls. Therefore the natural landscape can also be defined as positive, structured space accommodating patterns of settlement and human activities.” {89-90} Perhaps, then, lost space is meaningless space with no distinct use and no clear purpose — but while that might include the edges of interstate highways, it would seem to leave out surface parking lots and strip shopping centers, even if their distinct uses and clear purposes are banal.

He goes on to denigrate the mixing of urban and rural spaces, when “both suffer.” Yet it is easy to imagine a contrary suburbanite echoing his language: “Enclosure of suburban space is derived from natural features of topography and land form, water, vegetation in the form of hedges, shade trees, and garden plots, as well as manmade enclosures.” Suburban structure is certainly looser and vaguer than a San Francisco street, but it’s still structure of a sort. Obviously Trancik finds something wrong with it, but if the reader doesn’t already agree, she never quite learns what it is.

In his discussion of figure-ground theory comes another try: “When the dialogue between the urban solids and voids is complete and perceivable, the spatial network tends to operate successfully. Fragments are incorporated into the framework and take on the character of the district. If the relationship of solids to voids is poorly balanced, fragments become disjointed, falling outside the framework; the result is lost space.” {106} It seems like we might be getting somewhere, but it’s still all intuitive — you’re just supposed to know when a “dialogue” becomes “perceivable”, or when a relationship of solid to void is “poorly balanced.” Of course, if you know, then you probably don’t need it explained to you. And if you don’t know, then it’s a mysterious although possibly comforting incantation.

Perhaps the element this book hints at but never quite makes explicit is human scale. As erect bipeds who range around six feet tall and whose eyes are a few inches apart, we tend to be more comfortable with some dimensions of empty space than others. We perceive them more easily than much larger ones, we measure them more easily with our eyes and with our bodies. And as creatures of habit, we tend to be more comfortable in built environs that reflect layers of past time (and hence are at least partly familiar) than in those that don’t. Such things were harder to say in 1986 precisely because modernist thought was still alive then in a way that it is not today, and one of its tenets was that there is no such thing as human nature.

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