About
Trace: exposed layers of meaning
Urbanism: accumulated iterations of design
Urban environments are in constant flux and ‘trace urbanism’ refers to this palimpsest of change.
The methods of city design are changing. Specifically, the affects of regional influence on place are strengthening concurrently with a rise in neighborhood activism in planning. If the next generation of designers is to respond in a meaningful way to the urban problems of our time, it is necessary to have studied both the globalizing systems that are manipulating this emergence and traditional community building exercises.
Trace Urbanism is authored by an architect turned urban designer with experience in holistic city building, including rural, suburban and urban environments. Its purpose is to explore the implications and motivations of the changes that impact our urban environments.
Thanks for joining in this pursuit, and I hope you’ll add your own voice to the conversation via the comments.
You can contact me at arae08@gmail.com. Enjoy!
Hello, My name is Evelina, masterstudent in Urban Planning and Design in Stockholm, Sweden.
What is your comment about Koolhaas view on Atlanta?
/The blogg looks great by the way
fascinating stuff! we need more wifi cafes and informal work environments in Boston, not to mention powerful municipal networks, if we’re going to maintain our status as a startup hub. I think the macro/regional approach to planning is dead on.
Thanks for the comment! So, Koolhaas is all about architecture as ‘order-oppression’. He’s fascinated by a lack of hierarchy and views sprawl as a liberating, and uniquely energizing place. He categorizes the city as a site of perpetual change via capitalistic investment while he views the suburbs as more accessible, with their generic yet a malleable lack of authenticity. Therefore, the opportunity for reinvention is greater and designers are freed from nostalgia.
Essentially, what we can learn from Koolhaas’ commentary is that urbanists can lighten up. There is a certain modesty in the generic, and a respect for power. By creating enabling fields and loosening up enough to go with the flow, the instability of nomads are tamed. Planning often separates. But if diversity is sought by having various architects design bits and pieces of a vast, suburban ‘bigness’, then the site will appear to have been assembled in layers, rather than in interlocking joints, creating opportunities for event and program, rather than mere spaces and forms.