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.