Rubberbanding urbanism

Abstract

The comprehensive planning approach is a method that necessitates parceling activities, zones, and the connective infrastructure. Buildings thus become dumb boxes 8 that are repeated and placed in their work parcels, live parcels, or play parcels. The space between the boxes, either becomes neglected space or traffic space. :b. This stratification and separation is a product of the blunt expediency inherent in modern development. (Kwinter and Fabricius. "Generica," 525) In the past, it took ~ Cf.) decades or centuries to develop cities; now, it typically takes 5-15 years. (Ibid) This efficient and fast machine predicts social and local processes as the master plan ..... calculates every step. There is little regard for time as a major factor in this production, in terms of time as economic and political support systems that may change ~ behind the development project, and secondly, time as a component that may allow for unexpected behavioral and organizational patterns to emerge. The current C') strategy flattens the complexity of our contemporary urban condition, and the result is a stale, static, and culturally unsustainable urbanism. ..... Notodden is currently using this orderly process of structuring urbanism to revitalize the new downtown. This master plan exposes how the end architectural forms and urban patterns become static and life less. As a result, even when there is financial and political support for innovation as there are in Notodden, it seems we are stuck to repeat the same approaches and forms. The example of Notodden's master plan wholly exhibits the paradigm crisis in which urban planning is "exposed as anachronistic, dangerous and intellectually spurious." (Graham and Marvin, 110) However, the potential of Notodden, Norway, the site of exploration, lies in the transformation of the new city, not through the current master plan, but through the specific programmatic negotiations and architectural development of the currently proposed Blues Center. Architecture becomes the urban generator, and the Blues Center, which is transformed from a performance site in August for the annual Notodden Blues Festival, into a music, media and skills center. This first project becomes the catalyst for cultural, social and economic change for this urban area. By prioritizing and focusing on the potential energy of this principal vision, it generates other unexpected programmatic and place-making concepts that need to be conceived after this primary organizational, cultural, and economic force is constructed through a Rubberbanding Urbanism. Rubberbanding urbanism is an original concept that demands participants of the urban development process to perceive the existing urban scape as adjustable and negotiable. Within this urban scape, there are flexible boundaries or bands that can stretch beyond traditional parcel lines and overlap with other bands. As the notion of bands have no set definition attached to them yet in urbanism, it is easier to see them more abstractly at many scales: as predefined programs, as current parcels or boxes, or as infrastructure, building, open space. The goal is to rethink and reinvent density, function, and time in an urban and architectural context while allowing for negotiation at each step. Because the proposed site in Notodden is barren, this seems appropriate as a development idea. This method actively attempts to " ... [privilege] not the formal, morphological attributes of building, but rather [create] a repertoire of operatives affected by time patterns of connectivity, and changing populations of multiple components. "(Graham and Marvin, 110) The bands are dotted so that they suggest flexibility until other bands present constraints or parameters. As bands overlap or stretch, new hybrids can be created. Spaces, programs, and scapes can then be designed through this unpredictable and constantly negotiable process. Throughout the process, participants create the rules and protocols as they go.