Architecture of thought: Urban Design from a can of beer

This is the English version of my existing blog in Finnish called Mahdolliset kaupungit, which means pretty much the same as possible cities. The two do not correspond to each other, however, although they look alike. I will not directly translate any of the texts, but I will address some of the issues in both blogs, such as the ontology of cities, the burden of functionalism, smart cities, homelessness, and urban ecology. The reason for writing also in English is, of course, to reach a wider audience, but also because many of my friends and colleagues do not speak this strange language of five millions or so - and I don't expect them to learn it, as it is one of the most difficult languages of the world.

As you may have guessed, this blog is about cities, about what they are, about their planning and design, and about the people and cultures that they accommodate. This is both a professional and an academic blog, which tells something about what I do, being a professor of urban and regional planning in Aalto University, Finland. However, these posts are not academic essays in the traditional sense; I am also taking liberties in telling you stories from my personal experience, and I will also comment on things that I have read and what is happening in the field. Whenever I am directly using others' work (or my own published work), I will give references, but not all the time.

In this first post, I will try to describe my basic understanding of what cities are all about: that they are not big things, or big things on the move, but possibilities. Before doing this, however, I need to tell you something about myself, since my perspective to cities may sound rather strange to you. I started my academic career in the University of Turku in South-West Finland, studying subjects like theoretical and practical philosophy, economics, and theory and history of art. This may seem like a crazy combination, and it was. During the time of academic freedom of the late 1970s you could, however, freely choose. Actually I thought that economics would give me a job that philosophy or art never would, but it turned out that I was wrong. So I moved over to architecture that is a much more practical profession.

Studying architecture in Tampere University of Technology was, however, somewhat of a cultural shock to me. Having accustomed to reflection, analysis and argumentation, I suddenly found myself surrounded by people who couldn't care less of reflection, analysis or argumentation. They just did. The astonishing feature of Finnish architects, in contrast to many of their European colleagues, is to jump to conclusions, that is, design, without even analysing the problem. This is also their main strength, since they have no fear. One of my colleagues won a major competition in Copenhagen together with his friends without having much education in urban design, or much knowledge of the city for that matter. So they had to learn how to design cities pretty fast, in addition to the equally strange language of the Danes.

But it quickly became clear to me that this was not my cup of tea. There was, however, one professor, Jorma Mänty, who was interested in theory, in addition to being a professor of urban planning. Planning seemed to be less straightforward, since you don't have ready-made projects, and you need to consider the people, the economy, and the social realm that you are dealing with. Getting things built is not always the best option. So I turned to architectural theory and planning, and I spent some years as a practicing consultant after my graduation, until I returned to university in 1993, to lead a research project on ecological cities. From 1999 I have worked as professor of urban and regional planning, first in Helsinki University of Technology and, after its merger with two other universities, in Aalto University.

This short description of my background might help you to see the way that I am approaching cities and their planning. The triad of philosophy, architecture and planning has made me what I am, which means that I am particularly interested in what an earth are we thinking as we are planning and designing our cities. The architecture of thought, you might say.

But I also need to explain the meaning of the name of my blog. Let me do it with a story. In Finland, we have this odd tradition of socialising by inviting people to have a sauna bath (together, naked), and then discussing and drinking beer after it. Once we were wrapping up one of our courses in a sauna owned by the student union of our university.  In addition to our course of urban planning, I knew that the students had already taken a course on urban design (called Urban Space), so I asked them what they understood by urban space. Nobody even tried to define it.

I don't blame them. Students of architecture usually take space to be something that has a form, which can then be designed to have a different form. It is not material, since it seems to be between the material things like buildings. It may have some meanings, such as being intimate or pompous, in addition to its form. It is where people go, but the people are not needed to define the space in the first place. So the students naturally suspected that I was playing a trick on them. Which I was.

As they did not respond, I tried to explain my own understanding of urban space. Since there was no blackboard in the sauna, I used what I had, an empty can of beer in front of me. I changed its position on the table and said that they were hardly surprised to see that it could also take this different place on the table. Which meant, I suppose, that they already knew, before I moved it, that it could have taken this new position, although they had no idea that it would be moved, or where I was going to move it. So, in perceiving the can of beer, they had not only perceived a physical object in the place where it happened to be, but also the many possible places that it could take.

I don't know whether any of the students understood what I was talking about. My assistant lecturer certainly did not, since he suggested that I should make a video clip where the can would  be moving back and forth, like commuting cars between housing and workplaces. This was, of course, a total misunderstanding of the idea. It was not the actual movement that mattered, but the possibility of movement. And if you have a power to move, you also have a power to not move. Even cans can have that sort of power.

This may sound self-evident, but it is not. Philosophers know that I am talking about the difference between actuality and possibility that goes back to Aristotle and through the scholastics to modern philosophy of possible worlds. I am not going to discuss that, however, at least not yet. What I am trying to do is to show the way from the can of beer to urban design.

The city could be thought of as a big material object. Architects could think of it like a big building, with streets resembling corridors, central parks the atrium, and squares the rooms. No big difference, just the scale. But in both cases, we need to take into account the movement of people. The things are not fixed, they are changing all the time in space, so we are speaking of a spatio-temporal reality. Like the flowing water, people move through corridors or streets and take places in rooms and squares. This is still easy, since we may observe what they are doing, at a certain moment, or during a certain period of time. Being and moving is real, because it can be observed. Esse est percipi, as Berkeley would say.

But what if we include in our world the realm of the possible? This is something that you cannot observe. You could see the can in its original position, and then again in its new position. But you cannot see the many possible positions on the table that it has. Does it mean that you can only see the fixed can and its movement, and you have to imagine the other possible positions? Hardly, since you can always imagine the can floating in the air, but this is not one of its physical possibilities. No help from psychology here.

But what if we think of cities as realities that include not only things (the buildings, the trees, the pavement, the cars) and their recorded movement, but also their possibilities? Instead of the cars commuting back and forth, we would have the drivers considering whether to take the car or the bus, or where they should be heading and which road to take. The driver would have a set of different options to choose from. If we make it very unpleasant or expensive to take the car, he will not take it. He is not stupid. Unless of course if you forget the driver and see the flow of traffic as a natural force, like rivers. Then you will end up building more roads and lanes, in order to avoid congestion. But as we know, they will again be filled with cars. Why? Because more drivers will consider it a good idea to take the car.

Again, this may sound like a simple thing, but it is not. Urban researchers want to study the empirical reality (because at least that is real, not speculation), by observing the mobility of people and cars, and asking about their preferences through surveys. But there is no way of observing what they could have done, or what they should have done. In time the scholars will develop theories of how cities develop, what kind of patterns they exemplify, and how the housing market leads some districts to prosper and others to decline, for instance.

For planners and architects, the reality consisting of possibilities instead of actualities seems much more natural. The basic assumption behind every act of planning and design is that the future is not determined; why else should we plan for it, and not just expect for it to happen? So there must be a belief in other possibilities than only the ones that we see before our eyes, and where things seem to be going.

The thing is, however, that not everything that is possible is easily seen. My students could easily figure out where on the table the beer could be. But those developing our cities cannot so easily see what the cities could be. The realm of possibilities is infinite, even if we respect the physical (or economic, or ecological, or political, or social) context. The future of cities, the possible cities, cannot be seen. They have to be made visible. They have to be designed.


Kimmo Lapintie (2007) Modalities of Urban Space. Planning Theory, Vol. 6, ss. 36-51.

(This is a scholarly article I once wrote about space as possibilities. Unfortunately it is not freely available unless your institution has subscribed to the journal)