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Argument › No. 17/2025

Micro-Interventions in Urban Space Between Contextualism, Linealogy and Placemaking

https://doi.org/10.54508/Argument.17.01

  • / “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture and Urban Planning Bucharest, RO

Abstract

The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur theorized in his article “Architecture and Narrativity” (1998), addressed to architects and urban planners, three distinct levels of architectural thinking dedicated to place, having as a starting point phenomenological hermeneutics: prefiguration, configuration and refiguration. He thus outlined the foundations of a phenomenological and contextualist approach to urban space and architecture. Architects concerned with placemaking-type urban micro- interventions need adequate means of interpreting place, starting with both the contextualist tradition expressed in the early 1970s by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, and with the contribution brought by recent phenomenological hermeneutics. In this paper, I redevelop the contextualist methodology based on the identification of new phenomenological directions through which this approach could be enriched: the linealogy developed by the Scottish anthropologist Tim Ingold between 2007-2015 and the relatively recent concept of placemaking, which came to the attention of our profession through the study of William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980). My concern for micro-projects dedicated to the rehabilitation of physically and socially degraded spaces between buildings made me explore much broader theoretical directions, which intertwine the transdisciplinary concerns of humanistic geography, urban sociology, philosophy of place, urbanism and architecture. The expansion of areas of interest in place studies after 2020, especially those included in the volume edited by Lynne Manzo and Patrick Devine-Wright, Place Attachment: Advances in theory, Methods and Application (2021) and in the collection of texts edited by Dominique Hes and Cristina Hernandez-Santin, Placemaking Fundamentals for the Built Environment (2020), has allowed for new conceptual interrelationships within architectural theory, broadening the possibilities for understanding the heterogeneous conditions that underlie urban life. The critical challenge brought to traditional contextualism targets the limitations of Gestalt analysis and formalism based strictly on the urban poché method and figure-ground studies, confronting more deeply the interweaving of place and dwelling phenomena in the daily life of the city.

Keywords

place phenomenology, architectural topology, urban hermeneutics, transdisciplinarity

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