Improvisation Technology as Mode of Redesigning the Urban

This chapter elaborates on the notion of improvisation in urban design from a specific perspective, not as an informal, non-planning endeavor but as a way to re-use planning from a Situationist perspective. Design modulates to redesign. The aim is not to follow the ideology of creativity and its teleological imperative of creating something new but to work constructively with the “as found” in community to reassemble and draw relationships between actors and actants. Representational modes of design unveil their structural potential from an improvisational perspective: from a non-altering identity form to a performative (re)presentation of structure and relationship as open notation. The city is to be read as a performative process in which we all take part, whether we want to or not—externalization is over! It is about finding ways to internalize spatial relations, make them public, and act from there.