Some provocative paragraphs from the newsletter of a an urban design firm in NYC. The underlying theme is a call for a more flexible and resilient use of urban space.
A further instructive example, this one European, might be Kunsthaus Tacheles, the squatted former department store in the Mitte district of Berlin. Until its shuttering earlier this year, Tacheles supported the widest possible array of creative activity; unimpeded by any sort of regulation, the single structure functioned as a mothership for dozens of ad hoc artist’s studios, workshops, performance spaces, restaurants and bars.
Anyone who ever spent so much as an hour on the grounds of Tacheles will remember a few things about the place: its energy, of course. The way it encouraged (and rewarded) curiosity. The multiple modes in and through which you could engage it and the people who made it what it was. The point isn’t that every place can or should be reimagined as a graffiti-bedizened hive self-managed on anarchist lines — though a boy can wish — but that particularly intensive mixed use gives rise to a vivid and resonant micro-urbanity that has to be experienced to be understood.
Truth and Traditions 
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