11

Defining Urban Sites

Andrea Kahn
How does an urban site gain design definition? What delineates its
boundaries? How does it engage its surrounds? What determines its
scale? This essay works through the problem of site definition as a nec-
essarily indefinite task, especially when looking at terms of site defini-
tion in urban design. As used here, urban site makes double reference
to both the whole city and limited sites within it, since even the small-
est urban design intervention always speaks to the project of city-build-
ing writ large, and defining applies to both a process and its outcomes.
At issue are means of site definition in urban design as well as the site
knowledge they produce.
In design discourse, the qualifier “urban” attaches to the concept
of site to no significant effect. This should not be the case. When rep-
resenting urban sites, or relationships between sites in urban situations,
designers draw on concepts, terminologies, and graphic conventions
that pertain to all kinds of sites, in general. Common terms (place,
ground, context, scale, location, boundary, etc.) remain largely indis-
criminate with respect to differences in setting or settlement conditions.
Without benefit of language expressly applicable to urban sites, their
definition, as a subset of sites in general, remains tied to notions of
property and ownership, to a physically delimited and containable par-
cel of land. A site is defined as urban adjectivally, based either on geo-
graphic milieu (an urban design site refers to a limited place within an
already established urban area or to an urban area in its entirety) or
physical size (urban design sites are presumed to be larger than archi-
tectural sites and smaller than regional ones).
282 Andrea Kahn

Figure 11.1. Anonymous, Palmanuova Plan, 1713.

To frame a site in explicitly urban terms, I use examples from New

York City to lay out an operationally based definition concerned with
what a site “does” in the city rather than what (or where) it “is.” Then
I turn to the role of representation in the site definition process. Finally,
I conclude by offering up new terms to address the complexity inher-
ent in urban sites. These terms provide conceptual tools applicable to
urban analysis as well as urban design. By representing sites as having
multiple boundary conditions and multiple scales, they frame a new
conceptual model for describing, interpreting, and analyzing places
slated for urban design intervention.

DEFINING URBAN SITES

The point is not that drawing boundaries is somehow impermissi-

ble…but that the permeability of those boundaries has to be con-
stantly reasserted; more than this, that the space in which they are
drawn is not a simple plane. Each side folds over and implicates
the other in its constitution.1
 Defining Urban Sites 283

Figure 11.2. Leonardo da Vinci, View of Milan, sixteenth century.

Two drawings, a 1713 anonymous plan of the ideal Renaissance plan

of Palmanuova, and a sixteenth-century Leonardo da Vinci sketch of
Milan, register an often-overlooked but significant distinction in the
way designers define site limits as well as how they understand site
scale. The Palmanuova plan depicts the urban site as a clearly bounded
place. In this walled enclave intended to be impenetrable to attack, the
city is described as a fixed object in an open field. The drawing’s cen-
tered composition, inset textual inscriptions, and heavy dark lines
enclosing fortifications reinforce the reading of a city figure afloat in
empty space. The plan strongly delineates inside and outside. Inside
284 Andrea Kahn

the walls of this city rendered as discrete object, everything sits care-
fully contained in its proper place.
In stark contrast, da Vinci’s sketch swirls with the movements of
many trajectories crisscrossing an unbounded space. Radiating lines
activate the drawing’s surface, projecting an image that extends out-
ward beyond the edge of the page. Neither the bird’s eye view at the
bottom nor the plan above inscribes full enclosure. This drawing,
which depicts a set of active interrelations, makes it impossible to
locate the edge of the city. What lies inside its boundary and what lies
outside is unclear. The limits of this urban site cannot be pinned down
in the horizontal or the vertical dimension. Its boundaries remain
porous, its figure incomplete.
Comparing these historical images illustrates an important difference
between an idea of site linked to conventional notions of place and one
disentangled from notions of limited location. The single Palmanuova
plan conceives the city as stable and rigidly bounded. The composite
sketch of Milan shows an active setting with permeable limits, an urban
site comprised of many overlapping spaces. In Leonardo’s image no bor-
der divides site from situation. Rather than equating boundary with a
line of separation, this sketch encourages viewers to ask how an urban
site is linked to its outside. Instead of creating divisions that frame sim-
ple enclosures, as Palmanuova does, the looser and more porous image
of Milan offers an alternative conception of site limits and scale. It cap-
tures the complexity found in actual urban situations.
Consider, for example, a high-density residential project on a large
lot extending north from 56th to 72nd Street, on Manhattan’s Upper
West Side. Understood narrowly as legally owned property, this site—
developed by Donald Trump—obviously has a fixed boundary line.
However, since the urban impact of his development reaches well
beyond the edge of his parcel, when considered in urban terms, the
significance of this legal perimeter diminishes greatly. Trump City’s
urban site includes not only the ground under the residential towers,
but also those areas affected by their construction. For instance, a sub-
way station three blocks to the east required renovation to accom-
modate the expected load of thousands of new commuters, and a
waste treatment facility eighty blocks to the north in Harlem was built
to bear the infrastructural burden of Trump’s high-density towers.
 Defining Urban Sites 285

Forcing changes to New York City’s subway and sewage systems, the
property limits of the Trump site are hardly impervious to the many
forces that ultimately establish the project’s urban condition. Adopt-
ing an operational definition of the site—based on how it works in,
with, through, and upon its urban situation—alters the understand-
ing of Trump City’s “limits.”
Treating urban sites as operational constructs recasts their bound-
edness. Instead of demarcating simple metes and bounds, defining
urban site limits requires accounting for co-present, but not necessar-
ily spatially coincident fields of influence and effect. Urban sites encom-
pass proximate as well as nonproximate relations, physical as well as
nonphysical attributes.2 As settings for interactions and intersections
that transgress abstract property divisions, urban sites are conditioned
by, and contribute to, their surroundings.
Times Square, in New York, easily fits such description: a place
whose identity is comprised by interactions between a global circuit of
entertainment (the Disney Corporation, Condé Nast), a metropolitan
crossroads of commercial developments (Broadway and Seventh
Avenue), and a local district of direct and imaginary engagements
(Broadway shows, Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, ABC’s Good
Morning America, the minimal remains of an erstwhile thriving sex
industry). The specificity of this urban site is construed through an
array of co-present but not coincident operations. Its reality—or, more
accurately, its realities—are constituted through the experience of rad-
ically shifting programs in constant interaction. What defines Times
Square as an urban site is a function of the crossings of spatial net-
works, each with its own degree of spatial extension. The determina-
tion of its boundary—or again, more accurately, its boundaries—
depends on how far afield these networks, and their influence, reach.
As an urban site emplaced in numerous local, global, metropolitan,
and regional settings, Times Square is tied into diverse scaling processes
at one time. While it provides a particularly vivid example of the mul-
tiscaled site, urban sites—wherever they are located and whatever their
size—will be similarly constituted.
Hell’s Kitchen, lying just two blocks to the west, operates at just
as many scales. The area is at once a residential neighborhood, a
commercial district, and a nodal intersection of transportation
286 Andrea Kahn

infrastructures. It is the locus of a national highway system (entering

midtown Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel); regional, cross-
country, and international bus lines (arriving at and departing from
the Port Authority Terminal); a metropolitan public transit system
(subways and buses); global speculative ventures (proposed large-
scale development on the far West Side); citywide commercial mar-
kets (specialty food shops, restaurants catering to immigrant taxi
drivers); local communities (Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, with its
own association). Numerous fields of operation converge at this one
place, each involving different scales of activity. As such, the scale of
this site cannot be characterized as singly or simply urban. Rather,
this place operates at local, metropolitan, regional, national, and
global scales. As an urban site it is scaled through a set of dynamic
functions created by fluid interactions between many differentially
extensive processes.3
Embedded within, and constitutive of, so many framing contexts,
such multiscalar urban sites open to diverse interpretation.4 They are
saturated with difference, permeated with irreducible diversity: het-
erological, to borrow a term from Mikhail Bakhtin.5 They offer up
myriad dimensions for consideration (economic, social, historical,
physical, political, haptic), each of which situates the site within a
web of specific associations. In terms of their limits and their scales,
urban sites present designers with shifting and potentially conflicting
identities. As such, they are best characterized as resulting from “a
matrix of forces, impossible to recoup and therefore impossible to
resolve.”6 They are crisis objects that destabilize our certainty of the
real.7
Urban sites are dynamic rather than static, porous rather than
contained, “messy” like da Vinci’s Milan sketch rather than “neat”
like the ideal plan of Palmanuova. Defining them in design terms thus
does not come down to establishing some unique identity of a lim-
ited physical place, but quite the opposite. It involves recognizing the
overlay and interplay of multiple realities operating at the same time,
on the same place. How designers give definition to these multiva-
lent and multiscalar urban design sites, however, remains an open
question.
 Defining Urban Sites 287

REPRESENTING URBAN SITES

However forcefully the real and the represented world resist

fusion, however immutable the presence of that categorical bound-
ary line between them, they are nevertheless indissolubly tied up
with each other and find themselves in continual mutual interac-
tion, uninterrupted exchange goes on between them…8

Given an operational definition of urban sites as multiscalar, heteroglot

settings for interactions and intersections, how do designers think
through their complexity and multivalence? This question raises the
issue of site study and with it the means, methods, and modes of site
definition processes. As in any design process, ideas of site come
through making. Designers confront the challenge of defining urban
sites through a creative process of representation.
The artifacts of this process, representations such as drawings and
models, do not simply illustrate what designers think about (in this case,
the city); more profoundly, they reveal how designers think. The iden-
tities of an urban site can be construed many ways. Mappings can pres-
ent each “reality” separately and attempt to position each in relative
terms as a function of shared descriptive and analytic parameters (scale,
drawing type, categories of information, etc.). Or they can project a
heterogeneous urban condition by utilizing representational techniques
that actively combine distinct parameters. By bringing different realities
into contact and establishing methods to chart their interplay, the
process of site representation works as the staging ground of site think-
ing. It is a place of assembly and a point of departure for constructing
relations between and across different forms of site knowledge.
In common usage, representation is a word loaded with meaning; it
has political, philosophical, symbolic, and aesthetic dimensions, visual
and nonvisual connotations. Even in the relatively focused vocabulary
of design, representation is a term subject to misunderstanding. Used
as a noun, it refers to things made. Used as a verb, it refers to a process
of making. But these two meanings still do not make the full extent of
representation’s role in site definition apparent. Representation is a con-
ceptual tool that orders understanding of the multivalence of urban
288 Andrea Kahn

Figure 11.3. Rodolfo Lanciani, Forma Urbis Romae, Plate 15, 1893–1901.

Figure 11.4. Giambattista Nolli, Rome Plan, 1748.

sites. It is a means of literally thinking through their many realities—

presencing as well as positioning them in relative terms.
Site representations propose working hypotheses for comprehend-
ing and testing working definitions of urban site. To grasp the full
import of this idea, one first has to recognize the expansive potential
of representation: that in the most profound sense, representation is
not about depicting reality, but about making knowledge. For design,
it is a mode of conceptual operation, a process of knowledge forma-
tion. More than simply amassing and organizing facts, figures, and
impressions of a given condition, the descriptions and analyses that
 Defining Urban Sites 289

designers produce actually generate the knowledge necessary to engage

a given condition as a site. Site representation is not a matter of get-
ting a reality right as much as a matter of constructing forms of knowl-
edge that can cope with multiple realities. In this sense, site drawings,
models, and discourses are never mere second-order redescriptions of
some preexisting condition as much as they are evidence of thought in
formation, a thought about what the urban site might be.
At the most basic level, representation gives definition to the urban
site because it is a process in which different ideas of site settle down
or settle in—perhaps an idea found through urban history, as in
Rodolfo Lanciani’s Forma Urbis Romae mappings or, perhaps a idea
based on city form, as shown by Nolli’s well-known figure–grounds of
the same city. Each mapping proposes an identifiable site reality,
because each operates as a distinctive mode of site thinking. To ask
which of two representations depicts the real site is meaningless, just
as it makes no sense to ask which of two ways of thinking is correct.
Distinct site representations produce different artifacts, but each arti-
fact instantiates a similarly dialogic and creative performance, an
“experiment in contact with the real.”9 Site representations construct
site knowledge; they make site concepts manifest by design.

FIVE CONCEPTS FOR URBAN SITE THINKING

For urban design, site concepts matter. More than merely discursive,
they act as powerful tools to structure site thinking. Yet, without lan-
guage to discern between different kinds of sites, the ways designers
represent and engage with urban sites cannot be situationally derived.
Generic concepts only allow for generic site thinking. But design dis-
course has no specifically urban site concepts on offer. The five new
terms outlined in the following sections conceptualize sites in mean-
ingful ways for urban design.

Mobile Ground
Much of urban design, as a field of design action, involves framing
constructive conversations among different interests and agents in the
city. To be effective, designers at work on projects with urban aspi-
290 Andrea Kahn

rations must account for and negotiate between many players

invested in the future of a particular locale: workers, owners, neigh-
bors, and builders; politicians, developers, and bankers; preserva-
tionists, ecologists, and economists, to name but a few. Each inter-
ested party construes the urban design site according to its own
terms, adopting its own preferred modes of representation.* They all
claim to know it, but one player’s knowledge rarely conforms to the
knowledge held by others. Different lenses filter these understandings.
As concerns shift back and forth between various takes on the same
place, these oscillations define a variable field where the constructed and
the real are not opposed.10 They inscribe a mobile ground where urban
sites are understood as dynamic and provisional spaces, as points of
departure to parts unknown rather than places of arrival of fixed
address.11 Conceiving of urban sites as mobile ground foregrounds their
provisional condition, reminding designers that sites remain subject to
change beyond their control. On mobile ground, urban design actions
are best considered in strategic terms—focused on framing urban rela-
tions and structuring urban processes.12 Mobile ground describes a space
of progression, slippage, and continual revaluation, where diverse real-
ities tip over, into, and out of each other. It is where site boundaries and
site images shift, bend, and flex, depending on who is looking.

Site Reach
The issue of scale is key to the definition of urban sites, influencing how
designers understand the context of their work and how they define the
geographic extent of their areas of concern.** Because urban sites par-
ticipate in many differently scaled networks at once, talking about an
urban scale, as a singular measure or the attribute of some entity,

* “Multifamily housing sites are missing from most conceptions of suburban landscapes partly
because conventional ways of measuring and understanding urbanized areas have obscured their iden-
tification. The high densities of apartment concentrations relative to surrounding areas of detached
houses, for instance, are not captured by the common mapping tools used by planners and academics.
Census tracts, forecast analysis zones (FAZs), and transportation analysis zones (TAZs)—standard
geographic units of analysis used for mapping—are simply too large to capture the spatial patterning
of suburban development.” P. Hess, “Neighborhoods Apart.”
** “The definition of a study area can be seen as a subset of the problems involved in trying to
define a problem or formulate a solution to a problem, in geographic terms. The first difficulty lies in
establishing the criteria by which the relevant geographic boundaries are set. The second lies in the usu-
ally implicit and hidden assumptions being made about the nature of the problem and its confinement
to such boundaries.” P. Marcuse, “Study Areas, Sites, and the Geographic Approach to Public Action.”
 Defining Urban Sites 291

obscures the multiscalar condition of urban sites. Urban locales regis-

ter on multiple scalar networks, in some cases at different times, in
other cases simultaneously. Site reach measures the extent, range, and
level of interactions between a localized place and its urban surround-
ings. It gauges vicinities of exchange and intersection between places,
reciprocal and nonreciprocal relations, inscribed within and contribut-
ing to co-present urban spatial networks. For urban design, the con-
cept of site reach proposes a much-needed alternative to a conventional,
nested, and hierarchical model of scale that identifies different scales
with differently sized territories, and as such obscures the multiscalar
condition of urban sites. Urban sites are constructed by a complex over-
lay of distinct but interrelated uses, boundaries, forms, and temporal
sequences. In any given locale, variously scaled interactions establish a
unique set of linkages to other places. The reaches of a site depend on
the spatial and operational extension of those associations and con-
nectivities that tie it to other places. By situating any limited place
within the space of the city as a whole, site reach reinforces the fact
that any urban design intervention, no matter how limited in physical
scope, participates in a project of city-building writ large.

Site Construction
Although considered a predesign activity, site analysis inevitably pre-
figures and reflects design intentions.* The logics and values structur-
ing initial site observations are always and already prescribed by ideas
about the future modifications imagined for a place, and conversely,
the analysis process initiates a way of thinking about place that res-
onates through all subsequent phases of design.**

* “As often as not, an architect’s description of an existing context will soon underpin a subse-
quent series of decisions to intervene in that context. A characterization of context smuggles into the
design process a set of confirming values camouflaged as a description of existing conditions and
observed facts; the details of any description of context will usually indicate whether the speaker aims
to respect or reject it.” S. Isenstadt, “Contested Contexts.”
** “Site analysis, at a large scale and recorded through detached rational mappings, has given
way to site-readings and interpretations drawn from first-hand experience and from a specific site’s
social and ecological histories. These site-readings form a strong conceptual beginning for a design
response, and are registered in memorable drawings and mappings conveying a site’s physical prop-
erties, operations, and sensual impressions.” E. Meyer, “Site Citations.”
292 Andrea Kahn

In urban design, more often than not, sites are actively produced. Site
construction is a site study process that yields a designed understanding
of site through consciously selective viewing. The site definitions it pro-
duces are distinct from the design decision that results in establishing
project boundaries (the determination delimiting where design actions
physically take place).13 This site study method embraces design agendas
and asserts the interpretive basis of any site viewing process.
To define a site as urban, the process of site construction accounts
for multiple fields of influence and effect, each with distinct spatial lim-
its that in concert construe a territory of design concern. It recognizes,
but does not attempt to reconcile, heterogeneous urban orders and log-
ics. By not oversimplifying site complexity, this method of site study
initiates and supports nonreductive urban design actions. These site
analyses underscore the multivalence of urban sites, making of it a key
issue for urban design attention. Regional, metropolitan, and local
architectural; moving or static; large and small scale; close and distant:
each vantage point brings different aspects of a site to light and each
way of organizing site information (politically, economically, formally,
historically, spatially, etc.) results in a distinct site configuration. Indi-
vidually, these expose a predilection toward some combination of the
city’s myriad characters.* Drawn together, the many approaches begin
to approximate the multivalence built into the urban landscape. Rather
than conceive of sites as having one single bounding condition, site
construction posits that site boundaries shift in relation to the posi-
tion—the physical location and ideological stance—of their beholder.
It dispels the illusion of the city as either containable or controllable
by hypothesizing the urban situation as a porous and shifting space.14

Unbound Sites
Any design action for a limited site in a city is at once influenced by,
and has consequences for, the city as site. The impossibility of isolat-

* “Part of preparing a place to become a site involves the formation of new narratives. Familiar to
anyone who observes real estate development is the narrative onslaught that begins almost immediately
as developers and real estate brokers tout the benefits, for example, of their proposed apartment build-
ing, its compatibility with urbane lifestyles, and its prestigious address. Planners and designers are com-
plicit in this process. Their presence indicates a seriousness of purpose and even inevitability to the proj-
ect. Their reports and images portray and publicize the new place. The first act of real estate development
is the narrative remaking of the site.” R. Beauregard, “From Place to Site.”
 Defining Urban Sites 293

ing one urban locale, operationally, from its surrounds, lends urban
design its inherently public dimension, and acknowledging this public
dimension prompts a critical reassessment of how site boundary is typ-
ically understood in design. Irrespective of whether rights to a limited
development parcel are privately, publicly, or jointly held, design
actions in urban contexts have consequence beyond narrowly con-
strued limits of legal metes and bounds. The unbound site uncouples
the definition of site boundary from notions of ownership and prop-
erty. It views site limits as open to configuration according to various
forms and forces of determination.* Rather than drawing a line
between urban and site (equating boundary with a line of separation)
urban designers need to ask how many ways sites are linked to an
“outside,” to spaces, times, and places beyond their present and imme-
diate control.** Defining site boundary in terms of a single property
line produces a circumscribed figure, contained, isolatable, and con-
trollable (the site defined as entity under design control). Designers
need instead to recognize border porosities and to treat scale as a meas-
ure of boundary permeability. In this sense, the urban site is unbound
by virtue of its having many different structuring limits simultaneously
in play, not because its boundaries are simply effaced. Urban sites are
comprised of multiple fields (areas under design control, areas of influ-
ence and areas of effect) each delimited according to its own opera-
tional horizons.15

* “Grounds operate with great nuance. They resist hierarchy. There are no axes, centers or other
obviously explicit means of providing orientation. Single, uncomplicated meanings are rare. Instead,
there are open networks, partial fields, radical repetition, and suggestive fragments that overlap, weave
together, and constantly transform. Within this textural density edges, seams, junctures, and other gaps
reveal moments of fertile discontinuity where new relationships might grow. Relationships among
grounds, are multiple, shifting, and inclusive. They engage the particular and the concrete rather than
the abstract and the general.” R. Dripps, “Groundwork.”
** “Over the past thirty to fifty years, theories in the science of ecology have been reconsidered
in at least three major areas: first, with regard to whether local ecosystems can be considered “closed”
to larger-scale flows of materials and energy or whether the influences of these larger flows should be
considered integral to local systems (I will refer to this as the spatial scale paradigm shift); second, in
the degree to which local and regional history influences contemporary ecosystem dynamics (i.e., the
temporal scale shift); and third, in the explicit consideration of physical landscape patterns as an
important component of ecosystem functioning (i.e., the pattern shift). These developments have
broad implications for ecologists who now think differently about relationships between local obser-
vations and events (or local spatial arrangements) and relationships that are neither local nor recent.”
K. Hill “Shifting Sites.”
294 Andrea Kahn

Urban Constellation
Context is what the site is not. Yet urban sites exist and participate in
many contexts.* How, then, to define the confines of urban sites? The
traditional idea of context implies that sites derive definition from their
larger situation. Seeing a site “in context,” however, depends on main-
taining a clear distinction between inside and outside, thereby obscur-
ing the difference between the boundaries of a building lot and the
limits of an urban site.
At once a concept and a process, urban constellation blurs the line
between context and site by demarcating site interactions across mul-
tiple fields of urban operation. It refers to a dynamic relational con-
struct—formed by myriad interactions between variable forces (physi-
cal, social, political, economic, etc.) animated across multiple scales (as
embedded in local, metropolitan, regional, and global spatial net-
works)—and the process through which that construct is defined. The
process of urban constellation involves integrating knowledge of local
place-based urban characteristics with knowledge of larger-scale spa-
tial logics that underlie contemporary urbanism in all its forms. It
problematizes the received idea of context as some outside, impassive
backdrop.
Constructing urban constellations is not simply a matter of enlarg-
ing the contextual frame through which a particular place may be
viewed. Rather, the concept of urban constellation requires that design-
ers situate their urban sites in multiple contextual, or scalar, frames
simultaneously. Constellations foreground context itself as a variable.
Further, by projecting site and context as mutually implicated in the
other’s constitution, urban constellations reinforce understandings of
site as a relational construct.

* “Few cities or buildings are more thoroughly documented than Paris and the works of Le
Corbusier. Maps and aerial photographs of the sectors of Paris where Le Corbusier’s projects are
located are as readily availaable as the ubiquitous, published versions of the building plans, sections,
and elevations. Yet, no documentation exists of this architect’s work as it relates to its urban site. This
simple, yet huge omission in the otherwise endless sea of information and speculation on Le
Corbusier is astonishing. It demonstrates the pernicious obstinacy of a narrow framing of subject mat-
ter, which goes hand in hand with the modern concept of categorization. Categorization tends to dis-
tinguish and isolate, rather than relate. The ‘phenomenon of concordance’ referred to by Le Corbusier
occurs in the interstices between building plan and city map. It is here that the story of the ‘action of
the work’ on its surround is recorded, and where the ‘environment brings its weight to bear.’” W.
Redfield, “The Suppressed Site.”
 Defining Urban Sites 295

DEFINING THE INDEFINITE

The concepts outlined in the preceding sections consider urban design

sites as relational constructs. In so doing, they oblige relational site
thinking. They invite designers to consider how urban design sites dif-
fer from architectural ones on more than simply locational or dimen-
sional grounds, emphasizing that limited locales in cities incorporate
urban processes, systems, and logics that qualify and extend to the city
as a whole.
In lieu of adopting topology (or topography) to generate schematic
site representations, these new concepts set up a site definition process
grounded in tropology.16 Slippages in meaning between the terms inten-
tionally figure urban sites as dynamic and processive. Their purpose is
not to stabilize meaning, but to challenge the very idea of a stable
urban site. These tools frame a new conceptual model for thinking
about, and thinking through, urban sites. They construe the process of
urban site definition as one of defining the indefinite. Instead of defin-
ing site in a narrow lexical sense, these concepts activate gaps between
sign and meaning to characterize urban sites as spatially elastic and
temporally provisional. Each recasts received ideas of boundary and
scale in a slightly different way, yet all rebound around the same under-
lying point: that for urban design what matters is gaining under-
standing of the city in the site.

Notes
1. Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994),
72.
2. Melvyn Webber, “Urban Place and Non-Place Urban Realm,” in M. Webber
et. al., Explorations in Urban Structure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania, 1964).
3. Neil Brenner has written extensively on the issue of scale and scaling
processes. For a discussion of urban scale, see “The Urban Question as a
Scale Question: Reflections on Henri Lefebvre, Urban Theory and the Poli-
tics of Scale,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24
(2000): 361–378. For a discussion of the fluidity of scale, see Erik Swynge-
douw, “Neither Global nor Local: ‘Glocalization’ and the Politics of Scale,”
in K. Cox, ed., Spaces of Globalization (New York: Guildford Press, 1997),
137–166.
4. See Nigel Thrift on the definition of context as “active” and “differentially
extensive” in Spatial Formations (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 3.
296 Andrea Kahn

5. On heterology, see Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Prin-

ciple (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998), 56.
6. On heteroglossia, see M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. C.
Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 291.
7. The notion of the city as a “‘crisis-object’ which destabilizes our certainty of
‘the real’” comes from Robert Shields, “A Guide to Urban Representation
and What to Do about It: Alternative Traditions of Urban Theory,” in A.
King, ed., Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st
Century Metropolis (New York: NYU Press, 1996), 227.
8. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 254.
9. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (London: Athlone, 1988), 12.
10. On the constructed and the real, see Bruno Latour, “Whose Cosmos, Which
Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck,”
http://www.ensmp.fr/~latour/articles/article/92-BECK-CK.html (April 2004).
11. “Places are best thought of not so much as enduring sites, but as moments
of encounter, not so much as presents, fixed in space and time, but as vari-
able events, twists and fluxes of interaction.” Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift,
Cities: Re-Imagining the Urban (Oxford: Polity Press, 2000), 30.
12. See my Aarden Hank, “Nomadic Thoughts 1: LA” LAFORUM Newsletter
(September 1992): 5; and “Nomadic Thoughts 2: NJ,” LA FORUM Newslet-
ter (February 1993): 7.
13. On determining urban design site boundaries, see Edmund Bacon et al., “The
City Image,” in Elizabeth Geen, Jeanne R. Lowe, and Kenneth Walker, eds.,
Man and the Modern City (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963).
14. For a more extensive discussion of site construction, see my “From the
Ground Up: Programming the Urban Site” in Harvard Architectural Review
10 (1998): 54–71.
15. For a more elaborate discussion of the different areas of a design site, see
the editors’ introduction, “Why Site Matters.”
16. On the theory of tropes, see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical
Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1973), 31–38.