Susan Robertson

Visions of urban mobility: the Westway, London, England

This paper explores issues of urban architecture and geography through an interpretation of built form. More specifically, it attends to the urban landscapes of mobility of the elevated highway, showing how landscape and environment frame ideas and practices of movement. The concept of limited-access highways in the city could be considered as the epitome of modernity, reflecting the ever-increasing speed of everyday life and the distancing of individuals from communities. Separation from contact with the landscape and its effect on space-time relationships creates a new spatiality. The elevated highway project opens up the possibility of a completely new perception of the city, from above and at speed. The Westway, opened in 1970, is a two-and-a-half-mile long elevated highway linking the centre of London, England, with the west-of-England route to Oxford. The paper treats the space of the Westway in two particular ways: first as a modernist marker, symbolic of prevailing national urban aspirations; secondly as material form, through considering the Westway as machinic entity and as cinematic experience. Through this combination I argue that reading landscape as text is insufficient in the analysis of built form; other frameworks are necessary. In particular, this paper seeks to understand architectural space and form through a closer connection of body to space and form in both the kinaesthetic and imaginary senses.

Drawing the Urban Highway: Mobile Representations in Design and Architecture

Following an examination of the elevated highway’s diagrammatic and machinic qualities and its evocation as a cinematic sensorium (Robertson, 2007) the chapter will look at how architectural drawings, and the way they are interpreted, construct mobility in certain ways. The relationships and dependencies of graphic representations and lived experiences are examined as well as the shifting and accumulating discourses that arise between the drawn intention and realised design. Attempts have been made to represent the experience of driving through a development of notations (Appleyard et al., 1964), analogous with the role of Labanotation in dance choreography, in the context of the design of highways. In this chapter I will consider the paradoxes inherent in both the diagrammatic conceptualisations of future motorised cities and the representations of the experience of driving in the city that were developed at key moments when speed and technology were celebrated (see Dimendberg, 1995), for example, the development of motorways in England in the 1970s (Merriman, 2006). These will be compared with subsequent changes in focus to walking from urban designers such as Gordon Cullen and his ‘serial vision’ (Cullen, 1961) of experiencing the city (Gosling, 1996) and the evocative responses to, and mapping of, urban journeys as discussed by psychogeographers (Self, 1993).