Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life

by Franck; Karen

• ISBN13: 9780415701174
• ISBN10: 0415701171
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2006-12-13
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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, that simulate imagination and intervention. Loose spaces are places of possibility.Loose Space is first and foremost a book about physical spaces, their capacity to shape and support behaviour. Aimed at readers who are interested in spaces, how they look, work and how urban space can serve social life, Stevens and Franck discuss how the task of design might address those parts of the built environment that are undesigned or underdesigned.

Table of Contents

Illustration Credits	p. vii
Notes on Contributors	p. viii
Tying Down Loose Space	p. 1
Appropriation	p. 35
Found Spaces: Freedom of choice in public life	p. 38
Open-Ended Space: Urban streets in different cultural contexts	p. 54
Betwixt and Between: Building thresholds, liminality and public space	p. 73
Tension	p. 93
Urban Appropriation and Loose Spaces in the Guadalajara Cityscape	p. 96
Urban Slippage: Smooth and striated streetscapes in Bangkok	p. 113
Transforming Public Space into Sites of Mourning and Free Expression	p. 132
Central Park, the Aesthetics of Order and the Appearance of Looseness	p. 154
Resistance	p. 171
Heterotopias and the Experience of Porous Urban Space	p. 174
Stalker on Location	p. 193
Dead Zones, Outdoor Rooms and the Architecture of Transgression	p. 210
Discovery	p. 231
Social Practices, Sensual Excess and Aesthetic Transgression in Industrial Ruins	p. 234
Unruly and Robust: An abandoned industrial river	p. 253
Patterns of the Unplanned Urban Catalyst	p. 271
Annotated Bibliography	p. 289
Index	p. 296
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