ABSTRACT

This essay explores the challenge of site definition with specific reference to urban sites, positing it as a necessarily indefinite task. Drawing on examples from New York City, it lays out an operationally-based definition concerned with what an urban site “does” rather than what (or where) it “is.” It then turns to the role of representation in site definition processes, offering up a set of terms – mobile ground, site reach, site construction, unbound site, and urban constellation – to specifically address the complexity inherent in urban sites. The five terms provide conceptual tools equally applicable to urban site research and analysis as well as urban design practice. By representing any given site as multiply bounded and simultaneously operational at various scales, these additions to site discourse frame a new conceptual model for describing, interpreting, and analyzing places slated for urban design intervention as at once relational and dynamic. This model lays the foundation for “ecotone thinking” posited as an approach to urban design in the Anthropocene that borrows from landscape as well as ecology.