Salutogenese – Das Jahrbuch der KIT-Fakultät für Architektur 2021

Instead of “rigid images and precise delineations” ↘ 9 , it
nurtures the vitality of the urban imagination.
In essence, it is open. Through the opening of its spatial
affordances, experimentation becomes not only possible, but
seamless and accessible. Growth is seen not as a tabula-rasa
means of displacement, but as a dialogue between the past,
present and future. Above all it welcomes informality, which
is the essence of heterarchical openness.
I would argue that this constitutes a great potential in recovery
— from the pandemic, from totality. As planners and
designers, we can encourage forward-looking cities to nurture
a new paradigm in creating resilient, adaptable, human-centred
environments. The City as Social Laboratory
allows the experimental development of new rulesets that
can encourage both known best practice and innovation;
that can allow a diachronous, community-based development
that is never complete, and that adapts to social
change. In it, the concepts of recovery and renewal are part
of the fundamental logic of the system, not external to it.
Through the dissolution of totality we welcome the advent
of an evolutionary particularity, a contemporary vernacular.
This approach requires a reconsideration of the values underpinning
the development of the built environment. It
sacrifices clarity in that it rejects categorisation and embraces
ambiguity. It is disorderly, but it is a good kind of
disorder – one that engenders a sense of ownership of and
identification — a triumph rather than a tragedy of the
commons.
↘ 1
Kate Connolly, New ID Law Aims to
Help Reduce Digital Shyness in
Germany. The Guardian, May 22, 2021.
https://www.theguardian.com/
world/2021/may/22/new-id-law-aimsto-help-reduce-digital-shyness-ingermany
(accessed on June 6, 2021).
↘ 2
Tomáš Valena, Tom Avermaete (eds.),
Structuralism reloaded? Rule-based
design in architecture and urbanism:
Rule-based design in architecture
and urbanism (Fellbach: Edition Axel
Menges GmbH, 2010), p. 8.
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