In the article The Identity of a Place: Place-Based Interventions Between Land and Society, I argued for the necessity of a place-based document or report that could assist practitioners who work with places (e.g., architects, planners, politicians, social scientists, etc.) in making decisions, whenever they are concerned with understanding the character of a place from a holistic or, as I…
On the Modernity of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932)
1. Prologue: A New Vision of Nature ‘Since the middle of the nineteenth century, many traditional scientific certainties faded away, because of discoveries in Physics, Chemistry and Biology… A convergence between physical, biological and social sciences began and similarities between processes in living, non-living and social systems were noted. This led to hypothesize the existence of similar laws behind processes…
The Identity of a Place: Place-Based Interventions Between Land and Society
A few weeks ago, I answered a call launched by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), in association with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for one of their programs – the Multidisciplinary Research Project. That project aims to promote ‘new modes for collective research’.[1] This year, the sixth edition of the Research Project had the following theme: In the Hurricane,…
“… static patterns of value are divided into four systems: inorganic patterns, biological patterns, social patterns and intellectual patterns. They are exhaustive. That’s all there are. If you construct an encyclopedia of four topics – Inorganic, Biological, Social and Intellectual — nothing is left out. No ‘thing’, that is. Only Dynamic Quality, which cannot be described in any encyclopedia, is…
The recent spread of a new biological menace — the novel virus SARS-CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2) — has completely changed the appearance of our cities for months: during the lockdown period, the virus that caused the Coronavirus Disease 2019, or COVID-19, literally transformed the familiar places we were used to, into ghost territories. Image 1: Places are…