Scale alignment

New article in Urban Design International

Abstract: Globalisation has led to the transformation and proliferation of urban borders. Old hierarchies and relations between centres and sub-centres and centres and peripheries are challenged, and new alliances between different places and districts are formed. How can urban design and urban design research meet the challenges of a complex and quickly transforming multi-scalar society? In this article I make three arguments. First, I argue for a territorial perspective that would allow us to better acknowledge how actors of different scales come together and have effects on the level of urban design. Second, I argue that we need to better acknowledge the role of material culture in research on urban design; whereas urban design often benefits from the large-scale perspective of urban morphology, it seldom incorporates the roles of small-scale objects into studies. Finally, I argue that an important task for researchers in urban design is to see how actors of different scales are aligned, and through this alignment produce effects and changes in the ways in which our cities are used.

Keywords: Scale  Urban design  Material culture 

MAKING EFFECT - Symposium and exhibition

The Making Effect symposium & exhibition was held at 14–17 September 2017, at ArkDes, The Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design and KTH School of Architecture. There are some videos from the event. Here is the session about "MaterialConditions" with the following presenters: Mattias Kärrholm, Albena Yaneva, Alberto Altés, Catharina Gabrielsson, Jennifer Mack, Emma Nilsson, Paulina Prieto de la Fuente and Jilly Traganou.

Public and private in Hausmannian Paris (Territorial quote 3)

On territoriality and materiality:

"Second Empire architects also discouraged decorating practices that made domestic interiors resemble streets. In an article whose title – ”Des voies publiques et des maisons d’habitation à Paris” – signaled a conceptual separation between roads and houses, Charles Gourlier noted that within houses, wood parquet floors were replacing ”pavement” [dallages]. Formerly, slabs of concrete, stone, or marble had been used to cover floors inside apartments and to pave streets, but now they began to be confined strictly to the street. The street thus became a mineral realm whose hard, unyielding durability was perceptibly distinct from the more delicate, vegetal ground of the home."

Marcus S, Apartment Stories, City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London, 1999, p. 142 f.