A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Territory Between Product and Project: Rethinking the Limits
Territories are made out of limits. In our almost entirely artificialized territories, distinguishing urban from nature, city from country, becomes more complex and less relevant. However, the relationships between the actors who inhabit these territories and their ecologies are translated into a series of limits: Spatial realities, edges, plots, fences, thresholds, recognizable or invisible features; they produce and design the marks that shape the land, those multiple traces that constantly rewrite it as a palimpsest. Through those marks, the territory shows the social and spatial relationships that are being organized on its ground and inside its soil. Limits as “products” as places of relations, of confrontations and of contrasts between materials of the territory. Urbanism is a discipline that through limits establishes rights. And men, by various means, manipulate, create, install, transform these limits like so many “projects” which organize the relations between them. Therefore, the topic of limits is constantly swinging between a situation rooted in the physical and material reality of the territories and a highly conceptual and projectual concept. This is what makes its ambiguity and its richness. Describing limits in their physical reality, as product, and in their conceptual and transdisciplinary uses, as a project (Corboz in Le territoire comme palimpseste, pp 14–35, 1983), is then a way of looking at Belgian urban and rural territory under the assumption that one can transform the tools built around the concept of limit into the practice of urbanism. In contemporary territories, limits are places of potentiality and it is important to consider their ability to be transformed. This essay investigates the concept of limit in urbanism and its potential reinterpretation within the frame of the Belgian urban landscape.
Territory Between Product and Project: Rethinking the Limits
Territories are made out of limits. In our almost entirely artificialized territories, distinguishing urban from nature, city from country, becomes more complex and less relevant. However, the relationships between the actors who inhabit these territories and their ecologies are translated into a series of limits: Spatial realities, edges, plots, fences, thresholds, recognizable or invisible features; they produce and design the marks that shape the land, those multiple traces that constantly rewrite it as a palimpsest. Through those marks, the territory shows the social and spatial relationships that are being organized on its ground and inside its soil. Limits as “products” as places of relations, of confrontations and of contrasts between materials of the territory. Urbanism is a discipline that through limits establishes rights. And men, by various means, manipulate, create, install, transform these limits like so many “projects” which organize the relations between them. Therefore, the topic of limits is constantly swinging between a situation rooted in the physical and material reality of the territories and a highly conceptual and projectual concept. This is what makes its ambiguity and its richness. Describing limits in their physical reality, as product, and in their conceptual and transdisciplinary uses, as a project (Corboz in Le territoire comme palimpseste, pp 14–35, 1983), is then a way of looking at Belgian urban and rural territory under the assumption that one can transform the tools built around the concept of limit into the practice of urbanism. In contemporary territories, limits are places of potentiality and it is important to consider their ability to be transformed. This essay investigates the concept of limit in urbanism and its potential reinterpretation within the frame of the Belgian urban landscape.
Territory Between Product and Project: Rethinking the Limits
2018-01-01
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
urbanism , parcellaire , project , city-territory , ground division , limit
DDC:
710
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