Photo taken by Robin Chang at the 2022 IABR exhibition "It's About Time" in Rotterdam
Published November 9th, 2022

Reflecting on time

Reflexion über die Zeit

Transcript in English:
Robin Chang & Agnes Förster,
September 2022

It’s about time. This transcript documents an original conversation between Robin A. Chang and Agnes Förster reflecting on the meaning of time for urban planning. This was presented as the first part of the fifth AESOP Planning Theories Infinity series that took place on 5th of April 2022 discussing “Planning and Time”. More details are available here.

Höchste Zeit. Dieses Transkript dokumentiert ein Gespräch zwischen Robin A. Chang und Agnes Förster über die Bedeutung der Zeit für die Stadtplanung. Es wurde als erster Teil der fünften AESOP Planning Theories Infinity-Reihe präsentiert, die am 5. April 2022 zum Thema “Planung und Zeit” stattfand. Näheres finden Sie hier.

Photo taken by Robin Chang at the exhibition „Subversive Design“ at NRW-Forum in Düsseldorf

R: Do you remember that expression “Time will tell.” Because it can’t, right? I mean, the only telling it does is “told” and not “tell” – in the sense that we really can only look back into what has happened. A bit ironic for those like us, springing back into history in order to make steps forward to ‘plan’, don’t you think?

A: Well, you’re right. But don’t forget that there is a primary direction and vector to time, in that it moves us, or that we move with it, through what is today followed by tomorrow and the day after. The challenge with planning and time, is that it is inherent in the development and planning of space. It drives how we understand cycles and models in policy and planning. It flows through how we identify inputs, throughputs, outputs, outcome, and impact. We might not see it explicitly since much of the focus might be on the who and the how of processes. The momentum for how we move forward is driven by the vividness or clarity of the lessons and recollections from our past. And in moving forward, we try to make sense of how things could repeat or come to be by outlining phases or stages along processes. These are types of temporal overlays we use to create order in reality. Through concepts such as phases or stages, we are able to zoom-in or spotlight stakeholders entering into or exiting from models of interaction as well as other subjects of our interest.

R: I think I am starting to see your point of chronosynclastic infundibulum. This business of becoming unstuck in time is a bit disconcerting! Do you remember how Davoudi once pointed out time as cyclical and interlinked – something we forget when we became used to parceling and ordering time through ‘past,’ ‘present,’ and ‘future’ or sequence and interval. In fact, also Durkheim pointed this out when he began spending time in churches and listening to bells – kind of like that funny Doctor who went to Kamar-Taj to hang out with other magically religious folk?

A: What are you talking about?

R: Okay, let’s take a quick historical break from all this forward motion and visit Durkheim. He spent some time with monks, studying their way of life and drinking a beer or two. And what he found was a common tendency to think about time in a very particular way. This particular way commits to the principle of setting and measuring time through regular increments. It also relies on clocks and calendars as keystones to the incremental grids of life. If we consider how plans depend on these notions of time (plans also have targets or deadlines and conditions that are determined by calendars), then there is a legacy or even a lock-in for the ways we think about time. Our history here, is just as valuable in our considerations of the present or future. Because the structures set in the thinking and being from the past limit or allow us to continue or break away from the ways of thinking about time in the present and the future. Maybe we can need a planning version of the magical Eye of Agamotto? Just joking.

A: Yes! But jokes aside, that way of thinking did set the precedence for ordering activities, which we codify through plans. We can’t be fooled by this, because even though that sense of time – progressing, flowing and linear if you will, seems so plausible, it is actually so much more than we allow ourselves to understand and believe. Time certainly is not (only) linear. And, time most certainly cannot, in a measured fashion, assure us of what will be.

R: You’re right. I mean, time has many dimensions, too. It can be fast, and slow. Off-beat and in sync. We can see its pace in rapid development projects slowed down by red-tape and bureaucracy…random or coincidental.

A: That’s one way of looking at it. But do remember that it can be more concretely captured too – in the buildings and infrastructure that withstand the chafing of time. As well, these material forms scaffold the faster tempos of the economic and cultural flows that we socially create.

In a sense, time is embodied in the durability of the material world, which we overwhelming mark through the concept of durations. But time is also agile in its trajectories. And we can characterize this through its variety of temporalities.

Agnes Förster

R: Absolutely, there are tensions between our social sense of time and physical or material time. For sure!

A: Do you also remember asynchronous time? This becomes clearer when the timelessness of the built world might contrast with the accelerating and decelerating flows and traffic that might come across as “rushed” or as “fixed” because they lack the time in the spaces they need.

R: It’s almost as if Father Time held a grudge against the flows and forced them into syncopated trajectories. In the syncopated flows, different tempos and rhythms stand out against each other and this is how we can perceive, in an emphasized fashion, the diversity of rhythms in temporalities. I mean, syncopation is another way of marking, experiencing, or generating time or its temporalities, right? It’s just different because it’s not as regular and consistent in relation to the periods and intervals of the clock and calendar time. Like a food-truck vendor who might not have the luxury of popping up at the same street-corner every day at the same time like a fixed corner store might appear. Vendors might choose to, or be forced to follow streams of foot-traffic, popping up here or there in order to run their operation. This is definitely a contrast to that corner store operation, which is comparatively permanent. Whether we consider the footloose or the fixed as legacy or lock-in, now that depends on how we understand the complexity of time and temporality.

A: The way I see it, planning is the effort we put into coordinating these different times.

Our craft is in the way we pay attention to the diversity and simultaneity of time and temporalities.

Agnes Förster

This is how we might consider polyrhythmic places in design, bringing in harmony through eurhythmia and dissonance through arrythmia. We might think of time as directed like arrows, but it could be considered as more complex and richer like interpenetrating flows.

R: So, are we brokers of Time or manipulators of timestreams? What do you think? (looks to audience) We should, more appropriately, understand that time is multiple and patterned. And by using clocks, or plans and other devices, we calculate, plan, or reckon time.

Our way of being and living with time is made possible by these tools and their terms. By living and co-constructively perpetuating this temporal consciousness, we also (re)produce certain ways of thinking about time.

Robin Chang

Yes, yes, I remember Barbara Adam also pointing out these devices as a way of making it seem like time is given – almost unalterable and artefactual. But that’s not true, because instead of tied to fixed durations like our Tayloristic tendencies might encourage…

A: …it’s cyclical and recursive…

R: …[nods in agreement] Like Doctor Strange and the time loop he creates to defeat Dormammu…

A:…And that is also how it carries through and forth processes in space. Let us not forget that spatial processes are carried through by other processes in learning and communication. These are looped and entangled, too. Without learning and communication, it would be near impossible to effectively plan and inform the procedures shaping space. Let us consider public engagement and participation, for example. These run in parallel along with more formal, procedural or statutory processes. But in fact, and ideally, these also allow for “windows of opportunity” for a broader public to come together and attempt to inform more formal development. Through learning, followed by communication about the learning, we create new knowledge or values – maybe even create or legitimize new and possible realities. As forms of newly aggregated wisdom, the knowledge, values and possible realities shift the way we see time and allow us to supply heightened and anticipatory wisdom back into planning. You also once mentioned temporary users and how they re-shape space and structures through adaptive re-use. Well, how do they end up becoming a part of more integrated master or strategic planning processes? This is also another form of cyclical and recursive flow in time. Again, learning that the temporary users gained through experimentation matured and was communicated to feedforward into new learning and thus re-shape how time loops or feeds back into possible repeating patterns of planning. This is a slight simplification of accounts, I admit.

R: That’s right. However, unlike Dormammu, our enemies of sprawl and climate change amongst others, are less dramatically dooming depending on the way they’re depicted. I do remember you mentioning this before as well as how you pointed out the multi-level and scalar nature of processes in time. I believe, you contextualized this with transformational governance. Do you think we can find patterns in how we see this braiding of time and space – that planning is also our crystal ball in attempting to anticipate the rhythmic patterns of time?

A: That’s a great question – don’t we do this already through superstitions, allegories, sayings, dare I say… planning? There’s that one saying about seven lean years following seven good years…or how each civilization comes to an end…but and as you pointed out earlier, we can only truly describe what has already happened – time that has manifested in the past.

A better question might be if it is an illusion – this thing that we do through planning …anticipating temporal dynamics?

Agnes Förster

And even if it is not an illusion, only some might have the awareness and capacity to take ownership of the potential vectors in time.

R: Are you suggesting something along the lines of chronopolitics? That the whos and hows of interactions with time are nuanced? Some of the whos and hows are passive, unknowing, and so powerless or unknowing of their own unknowns. Whereas others are active, intentional, so they know their unknowns despite uncertainty. In other words, they could or could not be motivated to make temporal overlays seem opaque or chaotic? I guess we could try to overlay time as a dimension not only when we analyze events or processes, but also actors, their roles, and capacities? And I don’t mean this solely in a methodological sense like Gerrits and Pagliarin make about casing… I mean this in more phenomological and epistemological senses that frame time as we are empowered believe: in our minds and in our realities. Maybe our friend Thorsten Wiechmann might say something about this…

A: We should remember that the array of views and understandings of time reflects a diversity of actors and thus their truths. And beyond this we could better see planning as an activity of time, set in particular times. Planning is also tied to diverse temporal horizons or hindered by temporal barriers. Meanwhile, planning and its processes are temporal and filled with opportunities for us to question the rhythms that might feedback or forward through discrete intervals but also through fuzzy stages or varying sequences. All of this, we root in our practices, methods, and instruments. We are architects of processes, in such a way that a composer or arranger might set up staffs, keys, or the chords and counterpoints in musical notation. However, we cannot forget that these processes of planning must breathe – intentionally and intuitively – as musicians do with their phrasing.

R: But the breathing you mean here is not for our lungs but for conscious pauses or windows of opportunities to seek out and invite, or to listen and engage.

Since we – planners – are literate in the institutions and structures provided through planning, we are also empowered maybe even responsible or accountable in how we leverage time for change.

Robin Chang

Am I right in understanding your suggestion that we have the awareness to consider how we or others calibrate or compress the tempos and rates of processes? That we can create temporal pockets, as much as we can be generous with space for humanity? Do we really have the competency to consider those amenable to such temporal influence as well as those vulnerable to temporal foreclosures?

A: In a way. But our upper-hand flow with and along time is complex and subtle. We, to some extent, surf along the dynamics of spatial events. Our agency is made clear through our intentions to act or react. Our responsibility lies with our ability set up guardrails or impulses in the motions of these events. Our heightened sense of time and capacity for timing, is the essential and experiential wisdom that we develop through planning.

R: So, time is how we try to surf…maybe even steer. Boy, now we’re heading into timeslip territory…By encapsulating time as visions or helping others become competent in recognizing time as possible futures, we shape how planning influences time. This must also apply to how we value time, no? What I mean is that it also frames how we define our individual and collective time capital? By that I mean, the way we perceive value in time, whether that is expressed by the activities we exercise in a period and the amount of joy it brings or the dollar amounts we pay for this translated value. As well, time capital can be the ordering and sequencing of programmatic opportunities we tie into space by creating low-barrier thresholds for affordable housing, entrepreneurial incubation or even guard with boundaries to preserve lands. The values which we perceive and later attach to those activities as well as their relevant programmes and spaces are measured and quantitative indictors of our planning. But they are also the qualitative and temporal realities for which we are accountable.

A: Indeed, these contribute to a whole that has multiplicity of scales, of governance, structures, and of space.

Why not think of this as a point of entry into the design of transformation and broader change? Let us as planners, for a moment, reflect on timeliness, effectivities of time, and finally our responsibilities to better understanding time.

Agnes Förster