The Siting of Writing and the Writing of Sites

This chapter is a textual weave of voices produced through the practice of site-writing as a form of teaching and research. It brings four pieces of my own together with four works produced by my students, to suggest new urban methodologies: firstly, by combining image and text to produce variations in spatial relations; secondly, by exploring the architectural qualities of storytelling; thirdly, by blending of personal and academic writing styles to create different subject positions; fourthly, by investigating the interaction between material and psychic states; fifthly, by articulating the interactive relationship between writing and designing; and finally, by examining how writing responses to specific sites can propose innovative urban genres. It demonstrates how, by drawing on the emotional qualities of interactions between subjects and sites, techniques of spatial writing have the potential to reconfigure the relations between theory and practice, research and design in contemporary urbanism.

Jane Rendell, ‘The Siting of Writing, and the Writing of Sites’, Matthew Carmona (ed) Explorations in Urban Design: An Urban Design Research Primer (London: Ashgate, 2013).

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