The surfacing of urban life

Abstract

The apparently constitutive structures of urban life and its surfaces are assembled in complex relationships of mutual implication and divergence that envision and stabilize urban life into vastly uneven patterns of capacity. Still, the built and social forms that urban dwellers rely upon to recognize and operate with this unevenness constantly intersected in ways that generate constant yet provisional spaces and times of experimentation of uncertain but actual effect and reach. Specific locations come to inhabit conditions, constraints and possibilities which are at one and the same time both the same and different. This process is demonstrated here in terms of one of Southeast Asia's largest markets.