Reading #3: How to Define an Urban Site

I really appreciate the central point of this reading, "How to Define an Urban Site" by Andrea Kahn, that an urban site cannot be taken in isolation. Kahn states: "The point is not that drawing boundaries is impermissible...but that the permeability of those boundaries has to be constantly reasserted." Of course, as we have just read for Urban Theory, Christopher Alexander advocates a semi-lattice and not tree like view of the city, and it only makes sense that urban sites must be defined on a continuum with that around it in order to create a lattice.  This is not only true of an urban site, but true of all "objects". Manuel Delanda theorizes a history of meshworks working more emergently than hierarchies in his book: A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History.

In a more architectural context, Lars Spuybroek speaks of an architecture of continuity. Drawing his definition from Charles Sanders Pierce, he states that: "Continuity is part of real things, and therefore things are necessarily vague, since they are one and many at the same time". For Spuybroek, this has immediate architectural consequences: "There is a decisive difference between a fold and a corner. A fold in a piece of paper, for instance, doesn't interrupt the continuity of the surface, but with a corner, both surfaces just end there; at that point it becomes a nonelement, not even a part. Corners are where architecture is at its deadest." Instead of corners and discrete pre-defined elements, NOX's architecture is one of weaving, bundling, an interaction between line and surface. The relationship between architecture and "context" can work similarly, acknowledging an absence of edges, and embracing continuity.