Gerund Phrases

A Chicago suburb from an airplane window: May 2008Welcome to Gerund Phrases. As expressions of action, these posts demonstrate the varied approaches I follow in characterizing places. One of the defining characteristics of "place," for me, is the evidence of activity. Activity does not necessitate human impact or mobility. An open field - or an abandoned barn - can display just as much of the impact of external forces, such as nature or time, as large-scale urban infrastructure projects or an artist's installation.

The bottom line is: something happened in that space.

For all our in-depth reading on perceptions of space and place, the concept of activity as a fundamental signifier of spaces never made it to the forefront of our discussions. I don't say that as a critique, merely as an observation. Perhaps being located in New York has blinded us to the significance of activity. Or, as a reaction to urban living, we consciously segregate "inactive" spaces from active ones - city vs. country, for instance.

Do these posts illustrate the similarities between supposed "inactive" spaces and visibly bustling spaces? Hardly. Rather, they attempt to summarize, no matter how haphazardly, the ways in which methods of "place-making" and understanding spaces take shape in context, apart from the texts from this course.

Gerund Phrases is an experiment of sorts - of design, of planning, of exploration. It is May 2009 - the course is over, I am graduating - but this experiment is just beginning.