“unkempt areas of public parks where people are able to dump their compost of or see their grey water at work”

The above is a phrase i really love.

I think urban informatics gets at this issue but from a more digital perspective. I like faslanyc’s suggestion/consideration of pure bacteria and dirt.

tough to tell if there was anything of substance in that conference in your opinion, though.

That’s no accident — hopefully I’ll be able to render an opinion on that when I have a chance to watch further…

Nam:

Re: flu — I might have. Who knows. Had a nasty flu, now it’s better. Never went to the doctor.

Re: postindustrial: I’d say there’s a bit of space between Belanger and, say, Corner on that. Belanger’s research (which my familiarity with is admittedly fairly limited) seems to be heavily focused on systems, cycles, and ecologies of production, in a way that suggests a serious concern for the continued incorporation of industry into society. Which I think of as a strength.

Re: problems with an “empirical” approach and relationship to “informal urbanism”: I think this is an astute observation, and that you’ll find some resonance between your complaint (about simply marking out “x space” as “unprogrammed” and expecting that to take the place of an effort to figure out how informal practices might arise and how they might be encouraged) and faslanyc’s recent post on disingenuously-rendered working landscapes (which, without arguing about whether the description faslanyc provides is accurate or not, could be seen as another example of co-opting the idea or image of a messy set of processes without taking the effort to understand and realistically deploy the processes being co-opted).

As for the issue of the above mentioned empirical approach, my biggest problem with the way these folks do urbanism is that it seems to “postindustrial” (as in there isn’t any), and to formal. They may be inspired or interested in “informal urbanism” but where is the actual room created for informal structures, or informal urbanisitic practices.

Simply saying this x space is non-programmed doesn’t cut it. For me the informal is much more about these social and cultural metrics/practices..

Faslanyc: “was it that last question posited by Pierre? Was that question developed at all?” Yes, it was posted by Pierre. It was his guess as to what would be developed during the conference – he was one of the first speakers. As to the question of whether it actually does get investigated in the remaining talks, well, you’ll just have to read future “live”-blogs or buy the DVD to find out.

Belanger and OMA and Corner seem to try to only define urbanism in empirical terms, which is limited… Did you know that Belanger is a “professional registered surface minor, skilled in earth moving and heavy equipment operation”?

Perhaps the economies are the social structures. A sort of structure of principals.