My general idea has been that complexly linked, more self-aware places provide an antidote to simplistic serial places. Sprawl certainly can provide simplistic serial places. So we should preserve and increase the salience of connections and wider possibilities, refusing to pretend that we are totally defined by this or that grammar or place. Find ways to increase our awareness of links and contextual processes, and the interplay of systemic and cultural processes and pressures. Work to make more visible the multiple forces and flows and rhythms even in small regions. Make these rhythms more evident, and fight attempts to damp them down to a single beat.
The joint is the key. If we want to counterpose connected complexity to serial dispersal, we need to encourage self-consciousness of our norms and trajectories of action by emphasizing their temporal and spatial edges, and their constitutive connections and discontinuities. This means accentuating links and stages, borders and jumps and connections amid fields of possibilities. In the sprawl, as in themed places, we should show artifice as what it is, a putting together.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001