Psyche extended – drawing towards the periphery

This humanities-driven design research in sustainable development treats the extension of our cities into landscape and the extension of our psyches as two sides of the same coin. It explores the extension of the psyche in the hope of understanding peripheral development. It argues that we need a new plan language for landscapes that captures the spatial and psychical conditions of the periphery of our cities in the way that the Nolli Plan of Rome has given us a plan language for the city centre. It takes as given that the critical challenge for architecture with respect to the Anthropocene is to develop new forms of high-density settlement that push back against the peripheral sprawl that is one of the drivers of climate change. The planning of the new town of Cumbernauld in post-war Scotland (Phase 1 completed 1967) was an experiment in this kind of densely interactive social thinking. The paper focuses on unconscious desire and architectural typology, keystones in the respective discourses of psychoanalysis and architecture. Four design projects recuperate Cumbernauld in ways that conserve its value for subjects, if not its form, and develop a plan language of lines, words, and big things that aestheticise key features of our peripheral landscapes. The paper proposes a novel plan language for drawing the periphery of our cities, informed by psychoanalytic discourse, and which — if implemented — will impact upon development. This argument, which puts design practice and analytic discourse in dialogue, is episodic, defined by lacunae. It is unusual, if not exactly novel.