designSHIFT.org: April 2010

Monday 26 April 2010

A return to the polis by Swyngedouw

"What is at stake, then, is the practice of genuine democracy, of a return to the polis, the public space for the encounter and negotiation of disagreement, where those who have no place and are not counted or named, can acquire or, better still, appropriate voice."

Erik Swyngedouw, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2009.

What others say

" I am not all against modern architecture, I only think that as well as the permit to build, there should be permit to inhabit."
Jacques Tati, 1958

" Space, place and use are no longer seen abstractly as separate layers (space as background on which use occurs sometimes creating place) but as an interwoven sociospatial process." Pano Lehtovuori, 2009

" Space is a peculiar product - it is simultaneously the end result of production and the context of production, setting its conditions."

" ... many contemporary ideas about public space assume that a public space must, above all, be big enough. I believe the opposite is true: a space must be small enough to be public." Sjoerd Soeters, 2009

"... space is not constructed by one body but interaction of bodies. I am interested in bodies that are culturally and universally different, that encounter, ignore, desire, or even hate each other. Architecture sets the stage for this type of representation..."
Ignasi de Sola-Morales, 1996

" ... if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place."
Yi-Fu Tuan, 1977

"... improving the ordinary would be the really extraordinary move..." Descartes

"The sign is usually said to be put in the place of the thing itself, the present thing, 'thing' here standing equally for meaning or referent. The sign represents the present in its absence. It takes place of the present. When we cannot grasp or show the thing, state the present, the being 'present' when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go through the detour of the sign. We give or take signs. The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence." Jacques Derrida