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Filozofski vestnik  |  Volume XXXVIII  |  Number 3  |  2017  |  119–136
* HafenCity University Hamburg 
Christopher Dell*
Towards the Improvisation of Space
Reading urban reality
Urban agglomerations are currently undergoing a process of change and con-
centration, moving towards an ambiguous network of varied living spaces and 
different activities of human and non-humans, which somehow appears to 
develop from the opportunities and material constellations available. At the 
same time, there is evidence that this network cannot dispense with normative 
parameters altogether – the rules of urban organisation that influence the di-
rection of urban transformations. What is more, the conflicts surrounding this 
exertion of influence, as well as interpretations of urban populations and their 
right to interpret, are on the increase, as the examples of Gezi Park in Istanbul, 
Right to the City in Hamburg, Stuttgart 21, the riots in Sao Paulo, and the ban-
lieus in Paris have demonstrated, just to name a few.1 
These urban transformation processes have resulted in a fundamental shift in 
their meaning: the city is evolving into a significant social category in itself – 
and, conversely, society is perceived as becoming ever more urbanised. Howev-
er, according to Lefebvre, this social dimension of urbanisation, the expansion 
of the urban sphere, is not yet visible, or, more accurately, it remains hidden 
and unrecognisable to us.2 He concludes from this that “[k]nowledge of the ur-
ban phenomenon can only become a science in and through the conscious for-
mation of an urban praxis.”3 For town planners, urban developers, architects, 
and urbanists, this urban practice represents a blind spot or “blind field”: 
1 As witnessed by the social movements that have been forming in recent years under the 
banner “Right to the City”, and which have received a great deal of media attention. Cf., 
among others, Andrej Holm and Dirk Gebhardt (eds.), Initiativen für ein Recht auf Stadt. 
VSA Verlag, Hamburg 2011.
2 Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, University of Minnesota Press, London, Minneapo-
lis 2003, p. 29.
3 Ibid., p. 138.
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christopher dell
[T]hey don’t see it, and certainly cannot grasp it as such. With complete peace 
of mind, they substitute its representations of space, of social life, of groups 
and their relationships for praxis. They don’t know where these representations 
come from or what they imply – that is, the logic and strategy that they serve.4 
In other words, by being part of a complex of city planning, which is not only 
highly specialised but connected to a centralised form of organisation and 
representation, the professional designers of the urban miss out on the super-
seding practices of the everyday. Consequently, for urban development work 
to succeed in the broadest sense, and cooperatively, the crucial factor will be 
to find new forms for investigating everyday urban practice and for developing 
the skills needed for it. This thesis is supported by Lefebvre’s argument that a 
certain knowledge (which might be called upon) is expressed and unlocked in 
this practice, and stored within it as “silent”, “implicit”, or “tacit” knowledge. 
Lefebvre even goes so far as to say that the urban sphere itself is the key area 
of knowledge in the present and for mastering the tasks of the future. Hence 
new forms of investigation that lead to this practice are needed as well, in order 
to incorporate and utilise them. The recognisable phenomena of urban living 
environments do not reveal how the rhythms of the city are connected, nor does 
written documentation of everyday life alone provide access to the impacts of 
urban processes. 
Somehow, in strange contrast to the fixed representations and plans of urban 
design, the urban sphere today articulates itself as being full of change, in-
tersecting movements, and unforeseeable situations. The inhabitants of cities 
seem to be passionate about the “here and now”. One can even claim that the 
urban sphere has become a social laboratory itself: even under its most norma-
tive regulations, the city is, and remains, a “space of possibility” in a constant 
state of flux, where no social condition can be captured permanently, or even 
definitively translated and frozen into a structural state. In other words, the 
constructive basis of the city is its contingency. 
Putting contingency at the fore as a positive resource of the city not only shifts 
the focus away from the city as object towards the city as process, while making 
the analysis of urban practice all the more important for all attempts at exert-
4 Ibid., p. 153.
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towards the improvisation of space
ing targeted influence on changes to the city. It furthermore implies a different 
reading of practice itself, drawing attention away from any substantialisation 
of action and to the constitutive effects of action. On the basis of this reading, 
one can claim that the condition for planning and architecture has changed. 
Its role is not to offer resolution and inherently new tabula rasa designs, but in-
stead to carefully examine urban praxis in contingent situations. In accordance 
with this observation, my argument is that urban practice can essentially be 
read as the technology of improvisation. In this context, the term improvisation 
technology indicates the attempt to move away from conventional courses of 
action and planning strategies, and to engage “in urban situations”: the aim 
is to explore the capacity and strength of change, and to make new links in a 
relational manner with actors and resources striving for transformation, thus 
facilitating or stimulating new relationships and assemblages of actions, ac-
tors, and discourses on urban sites. The following examples give an indication 
of what this could mean in practice. 
European urbanity
In his study “Hollocore Ruhrgebiet, 2002”, Rem Koolhaas shows that – and how – 
the so-called European city is being converted into a new form of European 
urbanity. In this project it finds its structural and geographic expression in the 
amorphous super-region linking Brussels, Amsterdam, and the Ruhr Valley: 32 
million inhabitants – 9% of Europe’s population – live there in cities and towns 
where no urban population exceeds a million, and where approximately 67% of 
the population live in cities with fewer than 200.000 inhabitants, in places no 
one has ever heard of. In order to create an “identity”, city centres are reduced 
to their traditional shopping streets, while the peripheries are filled with a mix-
ture of commercial, shopping, and industrial spaces, along with mansions and 
innovation parks – faceless urban matter embedded within massive new vari-
eties of greenery.
This type of fluctuating urbanity cannot be influenced by planning directed 
towards either function or form. Instead of its actions being based on creative 
drive, planning must resort to learning to interpret the increasingly disparate 
social claims to the city, so that new types of activity can be derived therefrom. 
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christopher dell
One has to concur with the writer Robert Musil: “It is reality that awakens pos-
sibilities, and nothing would be so perverse than to deny it.”5 
Creating a square
Lacaton & Vassal are team of architects who try to deal constructively with 
what already exists. The office’s interventions are based on the urban situation 
itself, in the “identifying elements, forces and energies which are genuinely 
determining the spatial performance of a given situation.”7 Lacaton & Vassal 
attempt to create spatial structures that will allow new appropriations of space. 
“For us, this is very often not architecture, but the activities that take place in or 
around it, thanks [to] or despite the architecture.”8 So how does it work? In 1996 
Lacaton & Vassal were commissioned to renovate Place Léon Aucoc, a square 
in the working-class quarter of Bordeaux. The architects began by spending 
a lot of time in the square, as a way of ascertaining its use. Through this phe-
nomenological approach they were able to establish that the square already 
had everything it needed in terms of structures. Consequently, they dispensed 
with architectural measures and instead set out a framework for the straight-
forward maintenance works that are typical of improvisation, and in this way 
they increased the utilisation of the square. This form of improvisation relies, 
admittedly, on intuition, but it cannot be achieved without the method of phe-
nomenological analysis (with an attempt to reveal the structures of subjective 
experience to themselves and others) and knowledge of how to change materi-
als minimally and then reconfigure them anew.
Everyday expertise 
Such an approach also requires a steady move towards being an “expert in the 
everyday”. Permanent repurposing is taking place in the course of urban usage, 
operating on the fringes of the logic of recycling of the established economy; 
this conversion process invents its own economies, which are to some extent 
informal, including the donation, reuse, and conversion of waste and rubbish, 
as can be seen in Europe’s cities. A migrant from Africa, with his or her minimal 
structural and economic resources and links to the complex network of his or 
5 Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1978 [first 
published in 1930], p. 17.
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towards the improvisation of space
her community, might introduce a new form and style into the function of “liv-
ing” or dwelling and thus “transforms” his standardised council apartment. A 
Turkish taxi service that sets up a booth in an IKEA car park introduces a new 
style to the “transport” function by offering visitors to the furniture store an 
informal way of getting their purchased items home more quickly and cheaply. 
These instances are not reflected in any statistics, but are examples of a whole 
range of urban lifestyles. On a daily basis, they enable the urban production of 
space, which has the capacity to make planning for urban development produc-
tive through improvisation alone. 
Premises of the analysis
In order to examine how city space results from urban practice, precautions 
must be taken. Firstly, one has to take into account the historical dimension, 
although it is not fashionable among many critics of the New Economy. By dis-
qualifying the new forms of capitalism as the end of history, they lose sight of 
the historical developments under which a development such as the subjec-
tivation of work could arise in the first place. For the fusion of life and work, 
flat hierarchies and patchwork identity are by no means phenomena ex nihilo. 
However, the relationship between practice and history cannot be taken as a 
criterion of truth in so far as that which prevails in practice holds automatically 
true. Nor is the negation of absolute truth intended as a speculative endeavour. 
In contrast to purely pragmatic as well as speculative thinking, no equation 
between the truth and the success of an action is assumed. So it is not about 
the success of a form of action in justifying a political and social theory. Rather, 
urban practices should be examined as an expression of social reality, which 
unfold performatively. Only then can the political power relations that consti-
tute and regulate the city be criticised, not in spite of, but because they produce 
forms of action that carry possibilities of other social forms within themselves. 
Theory must reflect actual production.
This does not imply withdrawing to an historicist point of view that claims one 
is dependent on the course of history. Rather, there is a dialectical process at 
work: In (everyday) urban practice, I performatively participate in the produc-
tion of the urban form (whether I want to or not), and at the same time I am 
influenced by this form as a time-specific situation or event. What to do can 
therefore not be determined in a linear chronological manner, but only with 
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regard to the quasi-invisible palimpsest of the unfolding history and its every-
day expression. That does not imply the neglect of theory in favour of activism 
(however pragmatic), but is intended for the conceptualisation of practice to ad-
vance in a kind of reverse applied theory, which revolves around the tactical el-
ements and dimensions of practice in their political importance. To do this it is 
necessary to clarify and thus strategically reveal and make visible the structure 
of subjective experience so that it can unfold as a vector in the political field.
This strategy, however, does not imply a denial of the increasing economisa-
tion of the social. Furthermore, to derive from that an overarching theory of 
the social would be to take it too literally. For example, both systems theory, 
which assumes autonomous subsystems, as well as neo-Marxism as economic 
determinism, or conservative cultural pessimism, assume a certain helpless-
ness of the individual with respect to society. The urban experience, however, 
is precisely characterised by the fact that it is permanently differentiated and 
that it is not reducible. This understanding of the city is related to its reading 
from a performative perspective, which entails reading the city as an unfolding 
of action situations. Politically, it follows from this that it is always possible for 
urban actors to find a gap in any power regime in order to try out and experi-
ment on new ways of socialising spatially.
Having stated that, it is important to locate the resources for thinking about ur-
ban practices in investigating the shifts and turns of the planning discourses of 
the 20th century. Generally speaking, the planning literature of the 20th century 
aimed at theorising the city as an organic whole, as a system with a driving log-
ic behind it. Using different methods and perspectives, these theories opened 
up a new view on the particular way of life in the city, such as being a place 
of civic engagement (Wirth6) and anonymity (Simmel7). While Simmel demon-
strated how the individual tries to develop forms to cope with the masses of city 
life, Wirth and the Chicago School exposed how communities organise in spa-
tial forms and create spaces of difference as well as homogeneity. More recent 
6 Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, in: American Journal of Sociology 44 (1) (July 1), 
1938, pp. 1–24.
7 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, Berlin 1903. Adapted by D. Weinstein 
from Kurt Wolff (trans.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Free Press, New York 1950, pp. 
409–424.
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towards the improvisation of space
analyses by scholars such as Bauman8 and Sennett9 observe a process of nego-
tiating the distance between the civil and the civic, the withdrawal from active 
citizenship into self-preservation in the city. However, having determined the 
spatial form, there still is a need in planning, as Thrift and Amin point out, to 
get to know how the extraordinary variety and complexity of the city as a place 
of multi-function, multi-use, of “work, consumption, circulation, play, creativ-
ity, excitement, boredom.” While they stated that the contemporary city “sup-
ports unimaginably diverse social practices,”10 it can no longer be regarded as 
a system with its own internal coherence. Consequently, Massey interprets the 
spatial formations of the city as a “dense network of interactions”11 produced 
by differentiation processes. The core of Massey’s reading is grounded on the 
specific theory of the production of space of Henri Lefebvre, which has also 
been taken up by many others, among them the American geographer Ed Soja. 
This theory understands urban space as a social product, which unfolds in an 
historical process. Social relationships exist inasmuch as they exist in space; 
they are realised as space, write themselves into space, and are produced as 
this very space. Thus, one has to point out that the change in the social and 
social space does not only take place in the forms of production, but also and 
especially in the relations of production.
 
Space is no longer the indifferent medium, the sum of places where the surplus 
value is formed, realized and distributed. It becomes the product of social labor, 
the very general object of production and consequently the formation of surplus 
value. This is how the production becomes socially within the very framework 
of neo-capitalism. In the recent past this would have been unforeseeable, since 
production and the social nature of production were thought of only in terms of 
the enterprise and the productive forces, it is apparent in the social production 
of space. [...] today, space as a whole enters into production as a product, through 
the buying, selling and exchange of parts of space.12 
8 Zygmunt Bauman, City of Fears, City of Hopes, Goldsmiths’ College, Centre for Urban and 
Community Research, London 2003.
9 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, London, 
Melbourne 1977.
10 Ash Amin, Nigel Thrift, Cities: Remaining Urban, Wiley, Cambridge 2002, p. 3.
11 Doreen B. Massey, John Allen, Steve Pile, City Worlds, Routledge, London, New York 1999, 
p. 160.
12 Lefebvre, Urban Revolution, pp. 154–155.
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christopher dell
The reading explained above sheds light on two distinctive features of the ur-
ban: Firstly, it implies that one can no longer conceptualise urban space as a 
container, as a fixed object or form. Rather, one must understand it as a dy-
namic constellation that is produced performatively. Secondly, the city can no 
longer be generalised. As the geographer David Harvey makes clear, the heter-
ogeneous experience and design of time-making is a crucial phenomenon of 
urban practice. “Multiple processes,” he argues, “generate multiple realities as 
opposed to Leibniz’s ideal differentiation in spatio-temporalities.” The how of 
praxis comes to the forefront: “the way in which multiple processes flow togeth-
er to construct a single consistent, coherent, though multi-faceted time-space 
system”13. The urban is determined by a large span of stored and heterogeneous 
space-time processes, it “cannot be examined independently of the diverse spa-
tio-temporalities such processes contain.”14 
This approach sees itself complemented by the actual theoretical conceptions 
that emerge, for example, from the actor-network theories of Michel Callon15 
and Bruno Latour16. They emphasise the (full) contingent and relational view of 
social organisation. Refuting essentialist or technological determinism, these 
theories replace the concept of absolute space by a relational conception. The 
decisive idea here again proves to be the understanding of agency as a purely 
relational and performative process. “In this perspective, social ordering oc-
curs through complex efforts of both humans and non-humans to engage other 
actors through performative actions that are fundamentally heterogeneous and 
impossible to generalize,” write Amin und Graham. They define agency as a 
“precarious, contingent effect, achieved only by continuous performance and 
only for the duration of that performance.”17 This focus on the heterogeneous 
modes of superposition and interactions, the polyrhythmic interconnections of 
urban actors, allows simplistic determinism to be overcome and at the same 
opens the way for an emphasis on the immense differentiation of the space-
13 Lefebvre, Urban Revolution, pp. 154–155.
14 David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Wiley, Oxford 1997, pp. 259, 
260–261.
15 M. Callon, P. Lascoumes, Y. Barthe, Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical 
Democracy, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA 2009.
16 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005.
17 Ash Amin, Stephen Graham, “The Ordinary City”, in: Transactions of the Institute of British 
Geographers, Volume 22, Issue 4, pp. 411–429.
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towards the improvisation of space
time opportunities of different social groups in the city. It is from this differ-
entiation that the new conceptualisation of an urban practice can emerge, a 
conceptualisation that asks how people improvise and appropriate space and 
time in a performative dimension.
In addition, the definition of agency as the impact of action brings the question 
of the scale of the political back into view.  The citizens began, as a result of fi-
nancial crises, to realise what is happening: The crisis first arrived in the cities. 
There was a lack of funding for kindergartens, schools, the fire department, 
building renovation, social housing, etc. In sum, the functioning of the city as 
a generator of the public became at risk. As a result, the city was rediscovered 
as a political issue. While the protests of the 1960s and 1970s, for example in 
Germany, were located in either squats (listen, for example, to the “Rauch Haus 
Song” by the 1970s German band Ton Steine Scherben) or the street (“Reclaim-
ing the Streets”), or later in the 1980s, as in the case of the nuclear movement di-
rected to the countryside – Brokdorf, Mutlangen, and Wackersdorf – the slogan 
now is: “Who owns the city?” This environs the city as a new scale of political 
agency. For in relation to questions of national or federal agricultural-related 
decisions, citizens are too far removed, and have little or no agency; the scale 
is too large. In contrast, the city with its everyday functions and use of servic-
es provides a scale in which concern for the distribution of and access to the 
common good can be articulated. On this scale, it is obvious that the citizens 
do not want to give up the power to act on their city – here is the place where 
people want to create and provide a comprehensive and comprehensible form 
of politics. Starting from an as yet undefined feeling, a process of transforma-
tion that changes the interpretation of the city develops. The result is a process 
that allows the conditions and relations of the right to the city to appear and, in 
Hegel’s phrase, Bildung (education).18 
18 “Culture or education is, as we may thus conclude, in its ultimate sense a liberation, and 
that of a high kind. Its task is to make possible the infinitely subjective substantiality of 
the ethical life. In the process we pass upwards from the direct and natural existence to 
what is spiritual and has the form of the universal. – In the individual agent this liberation 
involves a struggle against mere subjectivity, immediate desire, subjective vanity, and ca-
pricious liking. The hardness of the task is in part the cause of the disfavour under which it 
falls. None the less, it is through the labour of education that the subjective will itself wins 
possession of the objectivity, in which it alone is able and worthy of being the embodiment 
of the idea.” G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. S.W Dyde, Batoche Books Ltd., Onta-
rio 2001, p. 158.
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christopher dell
The issue of the right to housing, with respect to the displacement of low-in-
come resident groups from the centres of access to community facilities and the 
use of public space, is only one of the more important aspects Lefebvre (1967) 
subsumed under the phrase the “right to the city.” With the resurrection of this 
idea, a fundamental debate has opened up as to how the appropriation of space 
and production in the city might look today, and how this would be understood 
as the “politics” of social space. Nevertheless, the search for a form that would 
instantiate this, and how the concomitant crisis of representation could be de-
fined and handled, is still in its infancy.
From the Production to the Performance of Space?
If I may recapitulate: Soja makes  it clear at the outset that the aim of planning 
must be to develop new forms of organisation of the city, where producers of the 
urban act as political agents on different scales.19 Fundamental to this consid-
eration is the notion that space is socially produced. But this thesis has to be re-
fined: while the term production traditionally has a teleological connotation,20 
the city can no longer be defined as a teleological process. This is where the 
term performance comes into play. In this context, performance does not mean 
a theatre or speech act (although, there are perspectives of philosophy or per-
formance studies that relate to these notions), but rather refers to the concep-
tualisation and acknowledgement of the non-teleological and non-intentional 
levels of production of space which express themselves in the non-simultane-
ous developments of the city. The question of the city, the reorganisation of the 
urban, is a matter of compression as well as differentiation, the heterogeneity of 
co-habitation, not, however, as a result but as a condition of spatial production. 
The latter produces the different conjunctures of urban existence and thus, in-
ter alia, the normative question of the right to the city or of the right to housing. 
But how do we redefine the functionalist order when working, dwelling, and 
living one’s life converge? In any case, the performative turn not only forces 
a change in focus, shifting from the “what” to the “how”. The further funda-
19 See also Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies, Verso, London 1989.
20 See, e.g., Georg Lukács, Ontology of Social Being, Vol. 3: Labour, trans. David Fernbach, 
Merlin Press, London 1980.
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towards the improvisation of space
mental aspect of the concept of performativity to consider is the inclusion of 
indeterminacy in the concept of action, as Mersch has shown.21 
Subsequently, not only the question of the change from conceptualising the 
space as given fact to its production is crucial. Also the teleological concept 
of production is undermined by the contingency of the observed urban phe-
nomenon. Taking into consideration this distinctive orientation is crucial to 
understanding the epistemological consequences illustrated by the actual 
shifts in representations and the current evolution in mapping techniques and 
concepts applied by urban designers. The raft of case studies we see in books 
such as Made in Tokyo, Behaviourology,22 Plus, or Learning from Las Vegas fulfil 
their function in the course of the broadening of the discussion of the actual 
discourse on the urban. I see this discourse – with all its semantic and semi-
otic crises which undermine representation while producing it – as an inven-
tory, and a step towards broadening the discourse on what Sophie Wolfrum 
has termed “performative urbanism”23. And as Mersch has pointed out, there 
is only one performative scene – we cannot help but deal with the uncertainty 
of the urban.24
It is against this background that the social dimensions of architectural think-
ing and acting take on relevance. The effects of this transformation are not only 
a shift in focus away from the city as an object towards the city as a process, 
but also from production to performance. One conceives of architecture as not 
merely object-related, but also as situation- and context-related. With this shift 
21 Dieter Mersch, “The Power of the Performative”, in: Sophie Wolfrum, Nikolai v. Brandis, 
(eds.), Performative Urbanism. Generating and Designing Urban Space, (JOVIS), Berlin 
2015. One has to remark that pointing out, as Mersch did, that performance theory is of 
limited use for architecture or not compatible with it is simply a presumption of the the-
orist. Two points are worth mentioning: firstly, the practitioners have the right to make 
use of the theory to reorient themselves. Secondly, it is possible that the proscription of 
the use of the performance concept in architecture and urban design in fact shows that 
performance theorists are not aware of the latest developments in urban theory.
22 Atelier Bow WOW: Made in Tokio, Tokyo 2001; Atelier Bow Wow: Behaviourology, Rizzoli 
New York 2010; Druot, Lacaton & Vassal, PLUS – Les grands ensembles de logements – Ter-
ritoires d’exception, Gustavo Gili, Barcelona 2007; Venturi, Scot-Brown, Izenour: Learning 
from Las Vegas, MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1972.
23 Sophie Wolfrum, “Performative Urbanism”, in Performative Urbanism, op. cit.
24 See also Christopher Dell, Das Urbane, JOVIS, Berlin 2014.
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christopher dell
of focus questions arise concerning the relationship between structure (object), 
performance (situation), and acting subject. Currently, a strategy of urbanism 
is emerging from this reflection that I would like to describe as a transition in 
urban planning, a “reverse functionalism, a functionalism from below that re-
sults from the use of the city, from the operative interconnections of a topog-
raphy of potentialities that are functionally led to their actualization.”25 This 
strategy recognises that the city qua phenomenon is embedded in the context 
of a process that cannot be interpreted as a closed, completed product with im-
plemented or projected functions, but instead must be conceived as a perform-
ative practice, in which the use determines the form. But again, one has to ask 
what the notion of the performative could mean in the context of the city and 
its reverse functionalism.
Today, performance seems to appear as the modality that pervades all areas 
of production in capitalist societies, whether socio-cultural, technological, or 
organisational. Performance is the hallmark of the current relations of produc-
tion in society. If, following Henri Lefebvre, we conceive of space as something 
that is produced, performance thereby becomes the practical element of the 
way in which this space is “made”. Accordingly, every type of social organisa-
tion generates a living space that is in a direct causal context that encompasses 
social relations. In this way, a dialectic of space unfolds that interprets space as 
both a medium of social relations as well as a product that, as something that 
has been produced, can in turn retroactively affect society. This also entails 
that space is not objectively given, but instead is produced through social forc-
es. Produced space is therewith dependent above all on our performance, and 
the performance of the technologies we utilise. Space and performance thus 
represent an interplay of relationships that permeates everyday life and has 
far-ranging effects on the intermeshing of the individual and society. In sum-
mary, in industrial society, the individual was exposed to absolute external 
control and supervision, and disciplined according to the principle of “disci-
pline and punish”. In a post-industrial, urbanised society, in contrast, the per-
formance principle tends to prevail inasmuch as supervision is shifted into the 
subject himself and social norms are internalised. Foucault formulated a the-
25 Christopher Dell, “Reverse Functionalism. Deleuze and the Structure of Diagrams”, in: 
Valena, Avermaete, and Vrachliotis (eds.), Structuralism Reloaded, Axel Menges, Stuttgart 
2011, p. 288. 
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towards the improvisation of space
oretical basis for this power shift from a disciplinary to a performative model 
in his study “The History of Governmentality”.26 Therein, he describes how the 
unfolding of power in modern society never occurs one-sidedly, but is instead 
always characterised by an interplay of self- and other-determined governance. 
Not only is this interplay the Archimedean point of almost all social problems 
of our times thus described, but our relationship to space – and therefore our 
role as subjects in space, more concretely as users and actors – can also be at-
tributed to this interplay. 
Cedric Price’s Fun Palace 
Prototypical of this development was the emergence of a new tactic with the 
aid of which marginalised groups or individuals aspired to the “centre” in the 
1960s. Instead of organising a majority by means of a protracted political strug-
gle, marginalised groups and persons sought to penetrate directly into the cen-
tre of societal debate from – seen in social terms – the outer point by means 
of maximally performative effects. What previously could only be achieved by 
means of securing a majority now functioned with the implementation of a tac-
tic of positing. In this context, the “Fun Palace” project of the English archi-
tect Cedric Price can be highlighted as a central prototype from the 1960s. As a 
round-the-clock multi-purpose entertainment centre, the Fun Palace combined 
communication technologies and building components into a performative ma-
chine aimed at adapting to the needs and wishes of its users.   
In order to meet the requirements of convertibility, the Fun Palace’s flexible 
structure was constructed along the lines of a shipyard and, depending on the 
changing situations, could be converted at the roof level by a crane structure. 
The circulating movement was made possible by connecting bridges and con-
veyor walkways. The concept of architecture as built space makes way here 
for the concept of a controlled space: functional governance regulates the con-
stellation of construction. Symbolic expression makes way for a time-based 
automation: moveable sun shields replace the function of the roof, spatial di-
vision is organised by screens, optical barriers, and steam zones. Specifically 
26 See Michel Foucault, “Governmentality”, in: Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter 
Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, University of Chicago Press, 
Chicago 1991, pp. 87–104.
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functional requirements such as sanitary facilities and kitchens are installed 
in standardised modules on mechanically moveable decks, thereby ensuring 
improvisational options. Here, built space is replaced by the concept of the ab-
stract meta-machine. Nevertheless, the Fun Palace had serious drawbacks: it 
was an externally controlled field, a cybernetic illusion of planning all possible 
solutions and situations in advance, or even worse: a manipulative space gov-
erned by the imperative to perform. 
Per-formed space 
Cedric Price’s Fun Palace demonstrated in exemplary fashion how architecture 
can function as a temporary expository machine of this transition in the so-
cial production of space. Thereby socio-political effectivity – in other words: 
the effects of the socio-cultural performance of architecture – likewise takes 
centre-stage. As an aesthetic form of action, architectural practice can also be 
a platform for new forms of political performance. In this connection, Rancière 
speaks of the creation of stages for lending visibility to new political actors.27 
When such stages of enablement are created, not only political goals play a 
role, but also the form in which they are per-formed. In this way, aesthetics can 
be regarded as central to politics, because it determines what Rancière calls 
the distribution of the sensible, which comes into form as aesthetic ‘regimes’. 
One should understand these as different forms of organisation encompassing 
forms of visibility, ways of making form, and ways of conceptualising these.
At first, form sounds alluring to architects: the discourse of form seems to con-
firm an understanding of space as pure form, as something transparent and 
intelligible. This conception makes it seem possible that the chaos of the world 
can be tamed rationally by means of an intellectually understood space, as if 
the complex tangle that is the city can be “generated” with a series of precisely 
defined operations. But this is deceptive. According to Lefebvre, in the urban 
context we experience a non-transparent, occult form: “Urban space purports 
to be transparent. Everything is symbolic [...], everything stands in relation to 
pure form, is the content of this form [...]. But one [...] notices that this transpar-
27 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel 
Rockhill, Continuum, London and New York 2004.
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towards the improvisation of space
ency is deceptive. The city, the urban, is also a mystery, occult.”28 Lefebvre’s 
point about form here can be easily misunderstood. This is due to his definition 
of form in relation to movement, to time. Space is interpreted as a storyline/
course of action, as a dynamic entity that has a structuring influence on the 
fabric of social relations and is co-determined by the latter at the same time. 
In this process, everyday life retroacts systematically on the performance of 
space. The possibilities of constituting spaces performatively are dependent on 
the given symbolic and material factors found in an action situation, on the 
habits and disposition of the actors, on the access control embedded in the 
structure, as well as on physical options. A shift in focus thereby begins, away 
from objects and towards that which objects make possible. Complexity and 
disorder arise from a field of urban actors, interactions, sites, and discourses 
that constitute the urban. The critical analysis offered in this article thus draws 
attention to improvisation as the mode of urban practice that seeks construc-
tive ways of dealing with disorder on the basis of the performative. Here, it is 
of decisive importance to interpret the outward form of performance not as a 
determinant, but instead solely as the point of departure for new forms. On the 
basis of this reading, I suggest turning the conventional understanding of form 
on its head. This is unspectacular, and for this very reason so effective. Those 
who assume that movement follows from form, can, for instance, as a city plan-
ner maintain that sufficient planning also produces the right urban movement. 
My view is the exact opposite: form emerges from movement and not the other 
way around! 
By re-reading the production of space as the improvisation of space, urbanism 
becomes situative: in the recognition that the doable, the real, the potential 
of the situation is drawn from the interplay of mutually influencing factors. If 
one desists from spending time pressing reality into forms, one gains the op-
portunity to analyse those structures that regulate the course of the process of 
transformation. It has the effect of liberation: discovering structural coherence 
in material disorder instead of avoiding disorder as form, and thereby taking 
urban practice and life itself as the point of departure. Instead of a call to order 
and a return to an overriding subject perspective, the issue now is the possibili-
ty of urban subjects to reconfigure themselves through improvisation. This also 
means: the consistency of the subject also does not remain untouched. 
28 Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, p. 120.
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But what is the relationship between performativity and improvisation? One can 
maintain that action is a performative act: in other words, something that is car-
ried out and that is full of indeterminacy. And vice versa: in order to become an 
emancipatory force, performance presupposes an art of action, a practical-re-
flective knowledge, a constructive, intersubjective approach with disorder: im-
provisation. If one speaks of improvisation as performance here, one is dealing 
with improvisation’s “showing of itself” in its cultural, technological, and social 
meanings as concurrent representation, achievement, and execution. 
Lacaton & Vassal revisited – An architecture of enablement 
and improvisation
In order to indicate how a shift from performance to improvisation can be 
tackled, I want to again draw on and look more closely at the example of the 
above-mentioned work by Lacaton & Vasall. They are an architectural office 
that is expressly committed to opening up individual free spaces. Anne Lacaton 
and Jean Philippe Vassal seek to grasp the essence of improvisation, form from 
movement, and to transport this into architecture. Here, they do not take as 
their point of departure the event-oriented programme of the 1980s and 1990s 
that aims to supply forms in order to generate events. They also do not conceive 
of form as an architectural problem of continual elaboration, but instead: form 
is the aggregate of an architectural analysis of a particular situation. Archi-
tecture is then primarily something that emerges from a situative movement: 
first life, the appropriation, the enabled improvisation are what constitute the 
spatial quality. In the case of Lacaton & Vassal, we can therefore speak of an 
architecture of enablement, a second-level production of space. They produce 
spatial structures that in turn enable the production of space. For Lacaton & 
Vassal, the spatial added-value is measured not in additional square meters 
alone, but also in the added potential of living movement, lived experience, and 
ultimately in the quality of life. The connection with time produces a lightness 
in architecture that counters the idea of the monumental, the eternal, removed 
from time. We discover a direct line to Price here. But inasmuch as architecture 
includes time as a factor of life and production in a building, it becomes lighter, 
more capable of transformation; even its own disappearance has been taken 
into consideration as well.  
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towards the improvisation of space
One could claim that Lacaton & Vassal proceed analogously to conceptual art: 
they analyse the interior of a situation and from this develop a conceptual pro-
gramme that transforms itself as long as it remains open until the time is ripe 
for admitting formal determinations. The given is what determines: the ques-
tion is posed in accordance with the consciousness for the situation. This can 
go so far that the architects refrain from intervening because they recognise 
that the situation already functions just as it is, as in the case of Place Leon 
Aucoc in Bordeaux. Changes in the previously existing, subtle balance of the 
place are out of the question. Lacaton & Vassal restrict themselves to simple 
maintenance work. Period! 
Just as a place can become a ready-made, technology can become an instru-
ment of reinterpretation, of détournement: hothouses are transformed into 
housing machines (Le Corbusier, unité d’habitation / Wohnmaschine). And 
since hothouses are also inexpensive and at the same time generate maximum 
openness, the view of the economy is likewise changed. Paradoxically, Lacaton 
& Vassal have integrated the economy as a driving force in such a calculated 
fashion that, on the other hand, they liberate themselves from it: “We never 
start from the idea that we’re going to build inexpensively; we ask ourselves 
how we’re going to be able to offer ourselves everything we want.”29 The build-
ings are so inexpensive that they enable luxury without a great deal of money: 
luxury for all. “Se libérer de l’idée de forme” thus does not mean dispensing 
with form, but deriving form from movement. This frees our attention for the 
significance of people’s everyday life and its movements generated from within. 
Improvisation of space
On account of the above, the key hypothesis would be that improvisation as 
a technology could be the mode of practice that enables not only navigation 
through the new urban spaces but also to produce them in situ. This implies 
understanding improvisation as a model of action that is to be regarded as a 
socio-material resource of the city. It acts as its facilitating structure in urban 
spaces that are characterised by dimensions of abrupt change, uncertainty, and 
insecurity. But that implies reconfiguring the term in question. Originally the 
29 A Conversation with Patrice Goulet, in: 2G, International Architecture Review, Barcelona 
2002, p. 123.
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term improvisation was used to describe a stage of repairing situations, to cor-
rect in a sloppy way what went wrong. Although improvisation is inherently as-
sociated with flexibility and mobility, it was only ever meant to be in temporary 
use. When cities become transit places, the situation turns around: complex 
urban space takes on the qualities of permanent improvisation. The form of 
transition becomes one of the key features of the everyday life of people living 
in the improvisatory state and improvisation technology becomes the technol-
ogy of the self30 that facilitates that individuals intersubjectively produce and 
use space. Yet the notion of improvisation as it is coined here does not speak of 
naïve vitalism or a socio-romantic notion of the everyday, but rather questions 
new modes of politics. In this way, the contemporary city is interpreted rather 
as a space of transition: In the actualities of change that can arise from the un-
expected reaction to and the spontaneous productions of urban life there lies 
the possibility of transformation, and, in general, the invention of new forms of 
organisation and thus new spaces of the political.
30 Foucault, Martin, Gutman, and Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with 
Michel Foucault, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst 1988.
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