The Power of The Infra-Ordinary

​Conclusion

The uncovering of these everyday infraordinary spatial engagements diverted the design process away from superficial form manipulation and the unnecessary burden of a concept driven beginning. By grounding the process of inquiry on the quotidian and the overlooked, familiarity is amplified, questioned, overturned, re-formulated and trans... See more

It’s all too easy to overlook the rush of activity that enables privileged retreat; the Othered precarity that ensures our security; the tangle of urban, regional, national, and global socio-technical networks that support our local stasis — unless we are ourselves a node within those essential systems, or unless we experience the repercussions of ... See more

When ruins become places for celebration and growth, they challenge the narrative of inevitable decay. They offer us the chance to cultivate Lefebrve’s ideas of “the right to the city” through the experience of everyday inhabitation.

This infrastructure will be more than a set of foundations or a scaffold. It will look, in fact, more like a playground: which exists, not subordinate to or below some other, more important work, but as a structure in its own right, one which supports, co-creates, and constantly re-produces play, creativity, imagination. Not something which can be

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The infrastructure of possibility—the spaces, conditions, practices, rituals, and language (and the networks of practitioners, communities, and organisations that nurture it)—destabilises conventional ways of seeing and knowing the world, and invites us to experience the fullness of reality, beyond the colonial constraints of modernity and its narr... See more

The dynamic echoes social and cultural geographer Tim Edensor’s idea of ruins as fluid spaces, where limits on material curiosity and imagination are let go, and exploration of alternative futures can thrive.

The town’s compassionate side serves as a different kind of preview, suggesting that ruins can play a powerful role in creating the more supportive futures we need.