Reflexives Entwerfen I Reflexive Design

Performative Urbanism –
designing the city
Sophie Wolfrum
140
P A T T E R N S O F S T E P S City and movement have been conceived together for a
long time. There is a rich history of productive conceptual alliances. Nikolai Antsiferov,
a geographer in St.Petersburg, led city field trips and excursions at the beginning of the
nineteen-twenties, in the pursuit of knowledge. The sensory perception of urban space
provides insights that are equally significant to those gained by research in libraries and
cartography. His book The Soul of Petersburg 1 became a cult book in the late Soviet Union.
It can be regarded as one of the precursors to urban and cultural studies, in which travelling,
careful observations of everyday life, intense involvement with the locality, and
the banality of transitory places play an important role. John Brinckerhoff Jackson rides
his motorbike from the east coast to the west coast of the USA, and everything he sees is
important. 2 This type of perception is not possible just sitting in libraries. Later in Kassel,
Lucius Burckhardt takes up the notion of excursions again, as the science of strolling or
promenadology. 3 Michel de Certeau wrote in 1980: ”The act of walking is to the urban
system what expressing oneself (the act of speaking) is to language or to formulated