Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life

ISBN-13: 9780415701174 / Angielski / Miękka / 2006 / 320 str.

Karen A. Franck; Quentin Stevens

Opis

Public space is a frequent theme in recent writing about cities; scholars describe ways in which urban activities, histories and identities are prescribed, controlled and homogenized. Yet, everyday urban dwellers encounter spaces that are loose, that manifest great variety and unpredictability, which simulate imagination and intervention. Loose spaces are places of possibility. What sets this book apart is that it is first and foremost a book about physical spaces, their capacity to shape and support behavior. It is aimed at readers who are interested in spaces: how they look and how they work and how urban space can serve social life. It provides a series of general speculations on how the task of design might address those parts of the built environment that are undersign or under designed.

Spis treści

Tying Down Loose Space  Appropriation  Found Spaces: Freedom of Choice in Public Life.  Open-Ended Space: Urban Streets in Two Cultural Contexts.  Betwixt and Between: Building Thresholds, Liminality and Public Space  Tension  Urban Appropriation and Loose Spaces in the Guadalajara Cityscape.  Urban Slippage: Smooth and Striated Streetscapes in Bangkok.  Transforming Public Space into Sites of Mourning and Free Expression.  Central Park: The Aesthetics of Order and the Appearance of Looseness  Resistance  Heterotopias and the Experience of Porous Space.  Stalker on Location.  Dead Zones, Outdoor Rooms and the Architecture of Transgression  Discovery  Social Practices, Sensual Excess and Aesthetic Transgression in Industrial Ruins.  Unruly and Robust: An Abandoned Industrial River.  Patterns of the Unplanned.  Annotated Bibliography

O autorze

Karen A. Franck is a Professor in the School of Architecture and the Department of Humanities at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Quentin Stevens is a Lecturer in urban design at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London.