Parkour Park In Denmark

Sweet as!, although for me it begins to take Parkour out of the public realm as soon as boundaries for these activities are created, and the appropriation becomes more standardised. I feel the same-way about skateboarding, in that when specific spaces begin to be created for these actions... then it looses something. Instead of responding to the environments, the environments respond to the repertoire of actions... and the initiative and the action of appropriation which is at the heart of the discipline becomes a little lost.

Another Abstraction to the Digital Realm

This really cool bit of software development allows the participant (intended for the use of landscape arch students) to use the insurgent techniques of 'part' of guerilla gardening in order to explore new landscape typologies and contexts.

http://www.designundersky.com/dus/2010/2/25/ludic-guerrilla-gardening-drone-warfare.html

I have some concerns though. Firstly, why do we need to abstract Guerilla Gardening, just like we have done to the Co-Adaptive Architecture movements of the late 70's and 80's.

Secondly, how can Guerilla Gardening work when it is removed from the real social and urban structures which it relies so heavily upon? Guerilla Gardening fails when it fails to generate committment and 'cultural investment' by participants... primarily because guerilla gardens... like any garden, requires to be maintained if it is not to go from productive intervention to smelly community eyesore. The real (un-hyped) Guerilla Gardening movement stress approaches to management, community involvement and is much more of a semi-candelstine activity than you would think.

The Guerilla Gardening movement in Brisbane that was initiated by 'Swaggie' (not by any means the only instance of Brisbane guerilla gardening) saw an initial involvement of over 100 participants in the streets of West End... but participation quickly fell to a committed 10-15 people. There was a very substantial amount of top-heavy administrative work required, and the particpants who were involved on a 'digger' level were often from outlying areas travelling to be part of the activity for the novelty or because they believed in the idea. After about 4 months of co-ordinated digging, bombing and planning the 'Swaggie' GG movement ran out of steam. This was despite the very best of intentions to develop local contacts, get press recognition, develop a 'leadership structure' and generate local involvement. Guerilla Gardening as a sustainable movement, needs to be able to be sustained by the participants on a community level and not an adminstrative one. And it needs 'vested interest'.
Plus.. the semi-subversive nature which this 'game' removes accounts for about 75% of the enjoyment in Guerilla Gardening... why would you want to do that?

In short.. I think Guerilla Gardening is a much deeper concept than this game might portray, and it has many more wide ranging possibilities for it's employ, beyond the education of landscape architecture students. It also has a lot more serious constraints that need to be negotiated...

So will Guerilla Gardening take the route of Co-Adaptive Urbanism?... or will people put the effort in to make it happen???... we shall see...

West Oakland: Upscaling Neighborhood, or Reviving Industrial Hub? | Planetizen

conflict over appropriation/organic models of development and top-down authoritative approaches here:West Oakland: Upscaling Neighborhood, or Reviving Industrial Hub? | Planetizen

Zoning for Food Trucks | Planetizen

Zoning for Food Trucks | Planetizen

DAN HILL on EMERGENT URBANISM

In response to DAN HILL on EMERGENT URBANISM on the City of Sound Blog I wrote the following, relating to where I want my thesis to be directed towards this year.

Ground Up communities can be exclusive without the interventions of top down planning. Natural organisms do not develop into complete homogenity. The contestation of space - in Derridean thought as in nature - is essential for the development of community, and it's character, and will exist, weather we enter into a techno-driven planing model, the traditional authoritarian model, or a grass roots evolutionary/system theory model.

I too find the trend in the last 20 years to limit the discourse of emergent urbanism to 'apps' and input driven parametric designs frustrating.
I find recent projects like SenseableCity's work and even the GRL; clever and entertaining and they do provoke further dialogue... but since Cedric Price's Fun Palace, I am still struggling to find significant haptic enabling of urban community beyond the constraints of the configurable home or the exclusive efforts of various sub-cultures, which require either the circumvention or peaceful disobedience of restrictive stereotypes/policy to enable them to express ownership or appropriation of space.

Surely we can develop methods for 'exploiting' (I hate that term, I hope you can understand it in this context) these placemaking practices for the development of new urban models. There's 20 years of literature and experiements to support it and there's plenty of precedent that we can use to 'market' it (again, a sensitive term - please take it out of it's contemporary context) to both authorities and corporate administrators of public space alike.

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