Salutogenese – Das Jahrbuch der KIT-Fakultät für Architektur 2021

is the pernicious implication of a divorce from preceding
conflicts and their discursive environments. Rather, each
development is a continuation of and reaction to a discourse
which is continuous and by no means linear. While it may
prove expedient to use terms such as post-modernism,
post-industrial society, or even post-pandemic, it is
important not to forget they refer to transitory moments in
cultural development, specific to a certain time and a certain
place — one which is heir to a legacy of political struggle
and social antagonisms, and whose spatial expressions are
the most pertinent markers of their legacy. Progress need
not come in the form of a cataclysmic rupture. Quite the opposite:
it must result from a gradual process, not as a linear
succession of upheavals, but emerging from a collection of
non-linear narratives of interpersonal and intercommunal
exchange. While it eschews the mantle of revolution, it is no
less radical for it.
Excessive emphasis on a tight (and admittedly elegant) fit
of form and function stand in the way of this gradational
form of development. Instead, the urban should be recognised
in its role as a container for both the generation and
subsequent resolution of social, political, economic and
cultural antagonisms. This is the essence of the City as a social
laboratory ↘ 7 . In it, the same belief systems, the same
notions of right and wrong, style and vulgarity, progress and
decline, would converge to determine not just what goes
on in a neighbourhood, but also what it looks like. More than
ever, these are mutable, constantly shifting and evolving,
progressing and inverting.
The ongoing crisis has done a lot to highlight the necessity
of revising our understanding of planning and regulation in
such a way that it can manage the pluralistic ambiguity inherent
to civil society, but continually repudiated in the built
environment. Rather than seeking solutions in a new all-encompassing
approach to planning, what we need is a kind
of contemporary vernacular — one which is procedural,
asymptotic, descriptive, open.
Lythgoe
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