POSSIBILITY ON THE URBAN EDGE

Bali Streetlife, 2013.

Possibility is the long view, and our orientation towards it. It is also the spirit of that orientation – the attachment we feel to the projected future. 

There is a special kind of possible that seeps through the everyday, and is an embedded trajectory within the lived-place. For Henri Lefebrve, part of the urban project was the continual regeneration of the idea of the urban. He asks us to continually re-look at what exists, to reconsider the possible.

Productive sites for thinking and making in this way can be found at the edges of material, spatial and conceptual categories. For me, Bali is a kind of 'urban edge', at which slippages occur. With this instability comes the possibility of knowing things differently.

Bali is tied up in its possibility of urbanity. For Lefebvre, the “possible is also part of the real and gives it a sense of direction, an orientation, a clear path to the horizon” (2003: 45). Bali is the edge of the possible; it straddles the current urban thing and what the urban thing might productively become.

AMBIGUITY & CONTRADICTION

Sennett, again, as I potter away with design.

WALKING WITH SENNETT

“The impulse is much more to really make the inside and the outside of buildings more interactive, ambiguous…”

— Richard Sennett

"A professor of sociology at the LSE, musician, novelist and unapologetic pipe-smoker, he has for 40-odd years been writing learned, lucid books about society: what's wrong with it, and how to make it better. He concentrates on cities and how we live in them; and so, how we live with other people. His writing is like his ideal city: not too formal, approachable, and a pleasant jumble rather than an austere and imposing procession of made-for-purpose edifices. He is the go-to prof when you want someone who can make a jargon-free case against, say, soullessness in urban planning."

Try as I might, it's hard to describe Richard Sennett much better than the Guardian's Nicholas Lezard did in early 2013.