Essay: Producing City – Performing Space

Producing City – Producing Space
Christopher Dell

 

Ausschnitt aus dem Essay:

“The urban reality today looks more like chaos and disorder – albeit one conceals a hidden order – than an object. (…) Rather than being an object that can be examined through contemplation, the reality of the urban phenomenon would be a virtual object.”[1] – Henri Lefèbvre

The core idea of this essay is: performative practices of everyday improvisation – understood as urban practice – set the conditions for the permanent re-occurence of the city as event. In that context the main aspects of my theoretical thinking about the city constitute the continuation of earlier studies in which I outlined a theory of improvisation. I attempt from different perspectives to convey something of the fascination of thinking of the city as an action – in the overlaying of the concepts of relationality, performance, improvisation and thinking space “musically”s. In the end, however, it is not about closing a circle, but to travel a path of recurrent and distinctive iterations woven into a historical track of thinking of and working on a very specific variant of urban theory.

This implies an investigation which questions the historical contexts, conditions and circumstances, the form of practice the production of the city has developed. I differentiate between two modes of improvisation: mode 1. the repair mode, and mode 2. the technical mode. The second mode deals with how the improvisation is historically classified as a procedure in the current situation as a practice of urban life, in other words, how it is historically conditioned. Consequently, in that context process techniques converge with time diagnostics.

 

[1] Lefebvre, Henri: The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis 2003, S. 57-58.

 

„Producing City – Performing Space“, in: Sofia Wolfrum/Nikolai von Brandis, Performative Urbanism: Generating and Designing Urban Space, Jovis Verlag, Berlin.