density inside out

To think of the city is always to invoke the question of density. Urban density has been celebrated, cultivated, worried about, managed, shunned. For some density is what makes the city full of promise, for others it is what determines its problems. Derived from the physical science formula for the ratio of mass to volume of inert materials, in urban applications density has operated as a seemingly objective measure of the ratio of people or activity to area. As a diagnostic tool density has been set to work in fields ranging from the pragmatic science of urban planning, to the arts of urban design. But the city is no mere inert material. It incorporates complex and fluid relations between bodies, infrastructures, technologies and built fabric, such that the matter of how density should be best measured – FAR, FSI, persons/ha, dwellings/ha – remains contentious. Indeed, as Kevin Lynch warned, as long ago as1962, ‘[m]any tricks can be played with density standards’. Density is imbued with powerful figurative, cultural and ideological associations, connoting everything from the unregulated hyper-density of Kowloon Walled City, to the bureaucratic agrarian utopianism of Soviet ‘desuburbism’, to the hope of a planet facing environmental crisis. Indeed, density measures may well be a symptom of the struggle to comprehend the complexity of lived socio-material relations, shaped as they are by proximity, mobility, distance, contiguity, congestion, distinction, camouflage, porosity, intensity.

In her famous urban intervention of 1961, Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs asked: ‘What are the proper densities for city dwellings?’. A range of urban pathologies – ill-health, anxiety, indifference, insurgency – had historically been attributed to improper density ratios, and since the nineteenth century the matter of density generated scientific investigations and interventions. In Jacobs’ view the answer to the question of ‘proper density’ was not about abstract formulas, but what she suggestively called ‘performance’. ‘Densities are too low, or too high’, she argued, ‘when they frustrate city diversity instead of abetting it […]. Right amounts are right amounts because of how they perform’. Jacobs sought to replace scientific abstraction with a magical, but immeasurable, choreography between body and ground. Writing at almost the same time, Lynch suggestively extended this thinking, arguing that density conceived of as a ratio between object and ground was too simplistic. Not least, such formulations ignored the role of technologies of various kinds that ‘weaken[ed] the connection of structures to ground’.

Density Inside Out conceives of density as a symptomatic material trope. It is curious about the way density has been put to use, be it as a defensive measure, a visionary formula, an instrument of governance, or a catalyst for urban innovation. It hopes to elaborate the ways density is a component of the city as a performed event. And it encourages investigations that hold the materialist, figurative and performative dimensions of density in creative tension. This conference offers an opportunity to re-imagine the relationship between conceptions of density and how technology, infrastructure, buildings and bodies are organized on, above, and even without the ground. Through the conversations that Density Inside Out will host, we hope to generate more nuanced and supple vocabularies that might serve new ways of imagining urban futures.

The following are some suggested thematic threads by which we hope to organize this conversation: