Exploring Everyday Streets
Part 3:
Localography
Jane Clossick, Birgit Hausleitner and Agustina Martire
There are many ways to absorb knowledge from an everyday street – some overt, some tacit – but it is important to understand that some street knowledge is specific to particular people and groups. The third section of this book addresses the issue of how to conduct research into everyday streets, asking the following question: What methodologies are best suited to unravelling the multiplicity and complexity of everyday streets? In this introduction, we discuss drawings, on-site engagement and action research, the various temporalities that our authors have encountered, and the value of participant observation. The approaches in this section offer an alternative to the simplistic definition of people on everyday streets as ‘users’, which deprives groups and individuals of their distinct identities in an attempt to quantify that which is inherently unquantifiable. In contrast, the authors here – in the streets of the US, Canada, UK, Ireland and Germany – dive deep into the relationships between people and the streetspace they occupy using a range of approaches that can collectively be referred to as ‘localography’.
About Jane Clossick
Jane Clossick is an urbanist, Senior Lecturer in Architecture, course leader for MA Architecture, Cities and Urbanism and studio leader for the Cities Unit in MArch Architecture at the School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University.
About Birgit Hausleitner
Birgit Hausleitner is an architect and urbanist, lecturer and researcher in the Urban Design section in the Department of Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology. Her research comprises work on urban diversity and mixed-use cities, focusing on the multi-scalar and configurational aspects of urban conditions that facilitate, introduce or improve combinations of living and working.
About Agustina Martire
Agustina Martire is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Queen’s University Belfast. She specialises in the study of everyday streets and their fabric, histories and experiences. She is especially interested in the way people experience the built environment, and how design can enable a more inclusive and just urban space. She has worked in schools of architecture in Buenos Aires, Delft, Dublin and Belfast and collaborates with a range of government and non-government organisations.