Everyday Urbanism is nonutopian or atopian, conversational, and nonstructuralist.
It is nonutopian because it celebrates and builds on everyday, ordinary life and reality, with little pretense about the possibility of a perfectible, tidy or ideal built environment. Indeed, as John Kaliski and others in Everyday Urbanism point out, the city and its designers must be open to and incorporate "the elements that remain elusive: ephemerality, cacophony, multiplicity and simultaneity."
It is this openness to populist informality that makes Everyday Urbanism conversational. It is non-structuralist because it downplays the direct relationship between physical design and social behavior. It, for instance, delights in the way indigenous and migrant groups informally respond in resourceful and imaginative ways to ad hoc conditions and marginal spaces. Appropriating space for commerce in parking and vacant lots, as well as private driveways and yards for garage sales can be more urban design by default than by intention. Form and function are seen to be structurally connected in a very loose way that highlights culture more than design as a determinant of behavior. Vernacular and street architecture ("quotidian bricolage" by one account) in vibrant, ethnic neighborhoods are held up as one instructive model or, at least, a point of departure.
Excerpt from an upcoming new version of the book: "The Essential Common Place" by Doug Kelbaugh
To dwell is to garden.
- Heidegger
