Salutogenese – Das Jahrbuch der KIT-Fakultät für Architektur 2021

The role of the planner or the architect then should be to
liberalise the affordances ↘ 8 of any given space, ensuring a
higher degree of adaptability. This can not only prolong
the period before an object, space, or facet of it becomes redundant,
but can eliminate redundancy altogether. Each
person’s use of a space is unique — by virtue of its uniqueness,
space is transformed into place. By maximising the possibilities
for appropriation and vernacular expansion, we
indirectly create a more adaptable fit of form and function
than any blueprint can provide. In the city as social laboratory,
social process is accorded the same value as formal
expression.
This kind of city is procedural, being continually renegotiated
between neighbours, strangers or even with oneself.
On a daily basis this may include the positioning of furniture,
where light affords a multitude of spatial arrangements.
On a weekly or monthly basis this may be programming of
the quarter’s central square, where redundant infrastructure
provides the possibility for diverse configuration of
planned and spontaneous events. On a yearly or decennial
basis, it could entail the rearrangement or recomposition
of building functions — an adjustment of the infill of the
urban morphology as it relates to functional distribution or
physical form. This last example requires a high degree of
adaptability of the typological building blocks that make
it up — a critical challenge for future planning.
It is asymptotic. It tends always towards a goal, but in
approaching it, it becomes evident that the circumstances
have changed. This presents a recontextualisation of the
problem to be solved. There is never a totalising solution,
only stages in a perennial process.
It is descriptive rather than prescriptive, allowing people
to find solutions to their own needs rather than presenting
them with solutions that presuppose them, or more insidiously,
attempting to convince them of non-existent needs.
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Diskurs