4.0 Analytic Borderlands
While cities, through some mix of magic, enchantment exert a magnetic attraction, the fascination is difficult to pin-down on any laboratory table, hence sorcery. Pushpa Arabindoo, from UCL Geography Department, summaries the enmeshed complications that arise for scholars who aspire to “a deeper ideological reflection borrowed from other disciplines”, noting plainly the challenge as “socializing urban design is not as easy as it seems” !
The urban economist, Saskia Sassen, names her socializing research method for capturing dynamics between systems as “analytic borderlands” whereby ‘discontinuities are given a terrain rather than reduced to a dividing line.’ This wider, looser field fits Whyte’s outlook whose “opportunistic adaptations of hypotheses” drew dynamically on theories from adjacent disciplines. Whereas Sassen taps into nodes on a circuit board of global transactions, Whyte’s impetus was more social; to make connections between single …show more content…
To conclude, Whyte made of all theories a common cause. Citiness. If this sounds relevant for urban theory today, his work is ripe for reinterpretation. Just as the measure of citiness at one scale should be assess by it impact at multiple other scales, so too the measure of urban theory at one level can be reassess by its reciprocity at many other levels and in adjacent fields.
Whyte’s advocacy of citiness worked for the city; his legacy is still felt in New York City today, which reshaped itself by policies of compaction rather than dispersal. A focus on Whyte’s measure of the city’s steps, stoops and seats, therefore, might not only remind us of how meta theory can be used to derive multiple micro-hypothesis but also to record why the ‘sorcery of cities’ still exerts its magnetic
While cities, through some mix of magic, enchantment exert a magnetic attraction, the fascination is difficult to pin-down on any laboratory table, hence sorcery. Pushpa Arabindoo, from UCL Geography Department, summaries the enmeshed complications that arise for scholars who aspire to “a deeper ideological reflection borrowed from other disciplines”, noting plainly the challenge as “socializing urban design is not as easy as it seems” !
The urban economist, Saskia Sassen, names her socializing research method for capturing dynamics between systems as “analytic borderlands” whereby ‘discontinuities are given a terrain rather than reduced to a dividing line.’ This wider, looser field fits Whyte’s outlook whose “opportunistic adaptations of hypotheses” drew dynamically on theories from adjacent disciplines. Whereas Sassen taps into nodes on a circuit board of global transactions, Whyte’s impetus was more social; to make connections between single …show more content…
To conclude, Whyte made of all theories a common cause. Citiness. If this sounds relevant for urban theory today, his work is ripe for reinterpretation. Just as the measure of citiness at one scale should be assess by it impact at multiple other scales, so too the measure of urban theory at one level can be reassess by its reciprocity at many other levels and in adjacent fields.
Whyte’s advocacy of citiness worked for the city; his legacy is still felt in New York City today, which reshaped itself by policies of compaction rather than dispersal. A focus on Whyte’s measure of the city’s steps, stoops and seats, therefore, might not only remind us of how meta theory can be used to derive multiple micro-hypothesis but also to record why the ‘sorcery of cities’ still exerts its magnetic