A Systemic Approach to the Construction of Urban Places

This paper reports on research undergone across three markets in the centre if London, England. The research adopts an ethnographic approach that focuses on the ongoing process construction. By using in-depth/ iterative interviews the work highlights both the changing narrative that people constructs ‘in the moment’ while also highlighting the role of researcher in place construction. This projects works on the premise that it is beneficial to understand places as complicated adaptive systems that are constituted by an array of heterogeneous parts. Places have physical locations and material forms but they are also in part, made up of the very people who experience the place. Understanding such complexity leads the researcher to focus on the ‘how’ of place, rather than the ‘what’, ‘where’, or ‘who’. Rather than attempting to understand place as unique, stable, concepts, this work builds on systems-theoretical approaches towards an understanding of places that facilitates both change and permanency so important to architecture and community building theories.