Participant: Timothy Jachna
Affiliation: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Format: Poster and Conversation
Themes: paradigm, praxis

A distinction can be drawn between two broadly conceived types of human action in the world:

…Plans, strategies, control, top-down, predetermination, formal…
…Situated actions, tactics, choice, bottom-up, spontaneity, informal…

The former type can be seen as the purview of authority and governance, the latter as the realm of habitation and life. Both types of practices are at play wherever there is a community of humans.

From an urbanist perspective, distinctions can be drawn between different urban cultures in terms of the different ways in which these two broadly defined modes of action in the world interface with one another in the formation and use of urban public space.Plans propose physical and regulatory constructs with the intention of establishing platforms for the support of informal action, frames for the setting of acceptable limits of informal action, defenses to counter informal action, etc.Urban citizens perform public space, using planned structures for their intended purposes, appropriating them for other purposes, complementing them by operating within the gaps in control structures, etc.

The proposed paper will concern itself with the various different modalities with which these two types of action interface in the articulation of urban public spaces. Cases from actual urban situations will be analyzed and juxtaposed to elucidate the variety of ways in which these two tendencies interface in cities, and an initial schema for categorizing the range of possibilities will be proposed.