2. The thickness is the "ur-matter" of urbanity. Thickness is ‘cityness’. Experiencing Thickness refers to the experience of intense urban space. The essence of Thick
Urban Space is life for its manifold appearances and qualities. Nevertheless, these do not necessarily sum up in an overall harmony, beauty or well being. On the
contrary: Thickness might be overwhelming and threatening, inclining the rambler to retreat inwardly. Furthermore: Thickness is not a comprehensible order; it is
neither exhaustible nor fully penetrable because it is never stable, always flickering; never wholly given but emerging, always becoming.
Belonging and Otherness are shaping constantly as the rambler engages the Multitudes, Inversions and Depth, constituting the urban phenomena of Thickness.
Multitudes of qualities, of quantities and of change is the basic condition of thickness, but structural and conceptual Inversions applied to it, manifested as gaps,
tensions or contrasts, infuse thick space with Depth, i.e. with the unknown, reframing it as a field of seeking, where meaning may be retrieved and recreated.
The intuition that urban space is thick is rooted in everyday life of ordinary urban environments. Initiating the research at our home town, Haifa, Israel, the final
choice was experiencing Thickness in several areas of Delhi and Mumbai, India, where the acute and thorough presence of generations of others is imbued in the
physical city as well as in the non-physical realms. The substantial description comes from the disposition of the rambler: porosity and participation. It collects,
it seeks, it designs a place which has no stable coordinates, but is contained by the city. The rambler is attentive and in full sensual tuning aimed at opportunities,
trails, and traces. Unlike the self-absorbed, or the flaneur, s/he is immersed in the Thickness. No aesthetic distance is maintained.
The method chosen started as a “regular”phenomenological research (Moustakas). It soon became clear however, that a somewhat different path had to be
undertaken, very much in consistency with the research object. This difference consisted in using a visual method parallel to the verbal one, proceeding from the
example of Norberg-Schulz who enigmatically twined in his phenomenology of architecture visual description by textual one; and in allowing overlapping and
repetitiveness in the course of proceeding from the substantial description to the essences of the researched phenomenon.
Our first methodological steps included: 'Rich description of Thick Urban Space experience'; and 'Preliminary grouping and labeling'; the next step, 'Reduction and
Elimination', intended to determine the Invariant Constituents of Thick Urban Space. Indeed, like in Moustakas we looked for significant moments of experience,
but the rigorous logical requirement of "necessary and sufficient" moments in Moustakas' method seemed too rigid for our theme. The experience of Thick Urban
Space as intertwined multitudes, while unquestionable as a whole, seemed to include contingencies, blurred edges and clouded meanings. Therefore we allowed
richer interrelations before the final reduction, suggesting a further and richer preservation of the nature of urban complexity, drown from the basic notions rather
than the fixed exclusion.
The thick urban space appears as a radically inter-subjective space, imbued with numerous generations of others intertwined with the wealthy expressions of
contemporary others. This multi layered accumulation of intertwined meaning, co-authored by others, overlapping, intermingled, covering and exposed, direct or
coded, is appearing as the thick field of seeking, of recreating meaning. Merleau-Ponty ontology identifies the Primary Expression-‘the silent voices’, the origin of
any later expression such as language and abstract thought-made universal by the poetic action or ‘aesthetic logos of the life-world”. Here, within the thick urban
matter, this loaded man-made space, wealthy and demented, yet accumulating since the ancient city of Ur, the primary expression is readily accessible via the
aesthetic action of the rambler: perception (porosity) and imagination (participation).
3. References
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Intertwining - the Chiasm" in Maurice Merleau-Ponty: basic writings, ed. Thomas Baldwin, Routledge (2004).
Moustakas, Clark. Phenomenological Research Methods. London and new Delhi: Sage, 1994.
Norberg-Schulz, Christian .Existence, Space and Architecture Praeger Publishers, London, 1971.
