The urbanized world today appears to be the socio-material result of space producing activities that are carried out indeterminately. Conceptions which still presuppose a preexisting city which need only be expanded upon no longer hold water. This loss, however, brings with it an opportunity to enquire into how the newly developed epistemological field of urbanity can become an object of negotiation. In a dialogue between epistemological figures of thought and aesthetic questions, Christopher Dell shows how knowledge of the urban can be explored today: medially guided by the mode of an artistic schematics, and performatively bound to an improvisational practice. In the process, a catalog of demands on the articulation of forms of knowledge develops, forms of knowledge that do not determine, but facilitate. The book is at once critical analysis and foundational work – it provides the first comprehensive framework for a knowledge-based understanding of current urban research.
