The intermediary urban scale

Many important design concepts have an unfixed format in current housing design. The fragmentation and seemingly uncontrolled expansion of cities question the definition of the current city. On a smaller scale there is nowadays no common idea of what a dwelling should be, in terms of image, spatial properties, construction or function. Flexibility is a key word in housing design. ‘The architectural view is increasingly shifting from its métier propre, that of ordering, towards change, towards an intellectual grasp of the unstable’ (Wohlhage, 1999). At the intermediary scale where the flexible dwelling and the cityscape meet, descriptions like ‘enclave’, ‘ensemble’ and ‘estate’ are in vogue. Such terminology has insufficient architectural precision to be credible as an answer to current urban problems. The instability of our cities is not that new – and cannot be an excuse for a professional attitude where anything goes.