Design in the Borderlands by Fry Tony Kalantidou Eleni

Author:Fry, Tony,Kalantidou, Eleni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

However, this is design with ontological consequences rather than ontological design. It does not have a positive and reflexively understood place to stand and qualify its own power as it projects itself onto the built-environment. What traditional design achieved in many ways was magnificent. As a person walked the street, the stones cried out the natural/social meaning of all being, even the direction in which they walked. However, in many circumstances it also had horrific consequences for the oppressed. Roman design depended on hubris, based on the belief that before a space was conquered and redesigned, little existed of cultural– political value in that original landscape. Roman imperial design was far from design ex nihilo – Nature, God(s) and human embodiment limited the terms of sacred geometry – but it did foreshadow the doctrine of terra nullius that modern colonising settlement was to bring to the fore.

A partial break with the dominance of traditional valences came with the sense that designers could construct an urban landscape out of their own sense of what was right and good. In the constitutive abstraction approach, the modern is defined by the way in which prior valences of social life, analogical, genealogical, mythological, cosmological and metaphorical relations, came to be reconstituted through a constructivist reframing of social practices in relation to basic categories of existence common to all humans, including temporality and performativity.

In constructivist terms, these basic categories of human existence become the terrain of different projects to be made and remade. Activities become projects to be thought and rethought anew. Bodies, landscapes, buildings, cities, genome systems, aesthetic principles and political systems all become projects for construction and reconstruction. Although, for a time, designing towns was developed with long-term utopian commitments, more recently urban design has become increasing reduced to making one’s mark on a zone marked by a thousand competing projects. Similarly, for a time, economics was seen as a social domain of life, but it increasingly became lifted out as the dominant domain of progress and development, including urban development.

A further ‘break’, within often-unacknowledged but strong continuities, came with the subjectivity and practice of relativising the meaning of all things, including the meaning of relatively stable ontological categories such as time and space. This sense of the postmodern is defined by the way in which prior valences of social life, analogical, genealogical, mythological, cosmological, metaphorical and constructivist valences, are reconstituted through a relativist reframing of social practices in relation to basic categories of existence common to all humans. In these terms, basic categories of the human are all open for deconstruction. In postmodern politics, for example, projections of alternatives are constantly relativised and displaced. Constant deconstruction is considered a virtue. The built-environment becomes a place for disrupting taken-for-granted assumptions and patterns of doing things.

Pictures of some Global South cities

Dominant formations notwithstanding, designing all cities, formally and informally, historically and now, is in practice fused with slow increment and unintended consequences. This happens in ways that make it difficult to separate out the

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