new unities

All places involve some degree of nonlinear spatiality and temporality. Contemporary places emphasize new kinds of unity. There are new kinds of wholes and unities, for instance the list with links, non-concentric unities, and so on.

So, show us some examples that aren't distasteful. Enough already about suburban commercial strips.

It's important to look at those "distasteful" examples. Part of the complexity message is that nothing is all bad.

That sounds nice, but you still don't provide enough examples.

There are more kinds of unity, more possibilities for change, and more possibilities for awareness, because even in forcibly serialized and simplified places there have to be, at the very least, non-linear temporal relationships that allow the place to be experienced over time, and these relations can't be confined to straight sequence.

I make claims about new kinds of place unities today, but while I provide some examples of new discontinuous, virtual, non-concentric, repeated, contested, and list-structured places, where are the non-linear places, or the places constituted by their links? Sometimes I feel like an impressario who opens the curtain with a flourish, to reveal an empty stage. More often I feel that we must look again at where we are. The places constituted by links, the non-linear unities, they are right in front of us, especially in the suburbs. We can see them there when we look at more than spatial proximities.


Index
Return to non-linear complexity
Return to the strip and the list
Continue on the objections path
objections/replies

(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001