READY-MADE

In a recent article in the volume Design Research, Kristine argues for a processual approach to urban planning. Here is an extract:

In process-oriented planning, aesthetics are not to be understood in the formal sense of the word. Rather, it is closer to the affective and strategic aesthetics proposed in Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1978) or Deleuze and Guattari’s affects. In their line of thought, ‘it is no longer a question of imposing a form upon a matter but of elaborating an increasingly rich and consistent material, the better to tap increasingly intense forces.’
Differentiating forces are in both perspectives what constitute urban processes. The notion of ‘plan’ in planning could accordingly be reconsidered in terms of ‘the plane’: it is not in itself given but is ‘as much a plan(e) of organization as of development’. Potentiality planning is, then, about visualizing and making amenable to control what causes the given to be given, in this or that state, at this and that moment.

Accordingly design research as a guidance of various perspectives in space and time could hardly be carried out by one discipline alone. It supports different forms of dialogue and collaboration in heterogeneous assemblages and is rather a generative foundation happening in the process when various knowledge disciplines work together as potentials within a plan.”

A ready-made urbanism?
In a ready-made context this approach imply for instance gaming as a way of reassembling urban space. Working with potentials in urban space enable us to open urban planning up to new methods. For instance, urban games and pervasive gaming are examples where urban reality is staged so as players can participate in the development of urban space. By playing the city in quite a literal sense, the players may overturn or reverse the programs of the city, thereby discovering new paths through the use of space.

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Kristine Samson: “The Becoming of Urban Space. From Design Obejct to Design Process” in Design Research. Synergies from Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Edited by Jesper Simonsen, Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt, Monika Büscher, John Damm Scheuer, Routledge 2010