18.10.11

Urban Sites

An urban site is defined as adjectivally, based either on geographic milieu or physical size. When an urban site or the relationship between sites in urban situations is represented, the designers draw on concepts, teminologies, and graphic conventios that pertain to all kinds of sites. When sites are represented as having multiple boundary conditions and multiple scales, they frame a new conceptual model or describing, interpreting, and analysing places slated for urban design intervention. The point is not that drawing boundaries is somehow has tobe constantly reasserted, for example: - The ideal Renaissance plan of Palmanuova and the sixtheenth-century Leonardo da Vinci sketch of Milan. The Palmanuova depicts the urban site as a clearly bounded place, while da Vince's sketch swirls with the movements of many trajectories crisscrossing an unbounded space. Treating urban sites as operational contructs recasts their boundaries, but of demarcating simple metes and bounds, defining urban site limits requires accounting for co-present, but not necessarily spatially coincident fields of influence and effect. Urban sites, in term of their limits and their scales, present designers with shifting and potentially conflicting identities. The identities of an urban site can be construed in many ways: Mapping or they can project a heterogeneous urban condition.




Five concepts for urban sitesthinking are


- Mobile Ground: urban design actions are considered in strategic terms-focused on framing urban relations and structuring urban processes. Mobile ground describes a space of progression, slippage, and continual revaluation, where diverse realities tip over, into, and out of eachother.


- Site Reach: it measures the extent, range, and levelof interactions between a localized place and its urban surrounding. It also reinforces the fact that any urban design intervention, no matter how limited in physical scope, participate in a project of city-building writ large.


- Site Construction: it is a site study process that yields a designed understanding of site through consciously selective viewing. It also posits that site boundaries shift in relation to position-the physical location and ideological stance-of their beholder.


- Unbound Sites: It uncouples the definition of site boundary from notions of ownership and property. It views site limits as open to configuration according to various forms and forces of detemination.


- Urban Constellation: it blurs the line between context and site by demarcating site interactions across multiple fields of urban operation. It refers to a dynamic relational contruct-formed by myriad interactions between variable forces animated across multiple scales and the process through which that construct is defined.

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