Guerilla's in the street...

More specifically, designers need to take a more active role instead of just complaining and blaming the helpless; designers need to change their role from that of commander and decision-maker to coordinator and facilitator (Hsia, 1993; Liu, 1995; Sanoff, 2000).

With quotes like that, I wonder if anyone could resist the wonderful Guerrilla Wars in Everyday Public Spaces: Reflections and Inspirations for Designers by Kin Wai Michael Siu.

Kin presents the history of deciphering of the urban spaces and the singular attempts of conventional planning by attempting to combine sociological thinking into the rather pragmatic equation of urban planning. While using three Hong Kong market streets as a basis for studying the ways in which we should study public spaces the concentration is removed from the traditional study of how built spaces impact the user to how the user inhabits the provided space. In fact, by working in the vacuum of a city street with restricted vehicular movement one can see the territoriality and social behavior of those that utilize the public domain in the most intimate of manners.

Not that every movement is unnecessarily unprescribed or even perhaps too regimented to present itself as a proper case study, the area under investigation finds a rather delicate harmonic between the rules and regulations of the street as well as the intent of those that use it. A major portion of the argument for studying the social behavior of design actually respects this dialog between what is described as the "weak" (inhabitants/hawkers) and the "strong" (governmental authority) and presents a rather wonderfully flexible and respecting solution while showing how the "weak" can actually rely on their flexibility to overcome restrictive regulations and rules.

While not inherently a proper study for American society and public space planning (in that cultural consumer and social differences, coupled with our prescriptive space planning techniques refuse to accept flex-space as a proper solution) there are arguments and nuances that could be further applied to perhaps facilitate good spaces in our fair city of Cleveland.

Regardless, it was a good read.