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Collaborative Spaces: Five Strategies for Softening | Vague Terrain

“The traditional model of creating space have been intimately tied to authority: one shapes the land one owns, the monarch shapes the castle, and the municipal government shapes the plaza. Inhabitants and passersby are subject to these master plans, confined to the activities and relations scripted to occur within them. Several apogees of this brand of urban planning have yielded proposals for some of the most iconic urban spaces: the Forbidden City in Beijing, the Haussmann Plan for Paris, the Radiant City of Le Corbusier. These precisely calculated, ‘hard’ spaces assumed that the lives of those who filled them would slot neatly into prescribed roles that were fixed for extended periods of time and only altered by the most profound social upheavals. Today, discourses of programme are considerably more fluid and acknowledge that space is largely defined through the patterns of its users. While construction methodologies and structural engineering evolve slowly, our perception of space—at all scales—has been revolutionized by the adoption of a host of new tools and protocols. Artist and researcher Mark Shepard describes the gradual emergence of networked urbanism as anticipating near-future cities capable of reflexive self-monitoring and behaviour adjustment – the endgame of computation “leaving the desktop and spilling out onto the sidewalks.”

MORE: Collaborative Spaces: Five Strategies for Softening | Vague Terrain