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Brook, R., Jefferies, T., 2013.

It's Just Juxtabridity

Output Type:Conference paper
Presented at:Association of American Geographers
Venue:Los Angeles
Dates:9/4/2013 - 13/4/2013

In many senses it is impossible to separate infrastructure and landscape and this convergence has been explored in critical urban theory since the middle of the last century. By moving architectural theory away from form, and alongside a paradigmatic shift toward 'networked' ecologies, the potential of the city and its latent conditions opened up to academics and practitioners across disciplines. This paper proposes a case study enquiry into a site at the edge of the city of Manchester, UK; a physical location that has seen the application of canals, sewage and water processing plants, power generation stations, water transfer pipelines, waste disposal fields, motorways, market gardening, regional shopping centres and leisure landscapes within a single square kilometre over the last two hundred years. Using mapping techniques and photography we will explore this particular urban periphery and its transformation in the twentieth century from a modernist functional landscape to a post-modern consumer landscape. We aim to disclose a series of planned, super-scaled impositions that have resulted in spectacular unplanned adjacencies. The physical context will be seen to permit these planned impositions as part of regional or national systems and networks. As such, developments will be demonstrated to be, by definition, controlled and ordered, but within their own delineated boundaries and axiomatically nescient toward local context. This, arguably uncoordinated, approach to development produces non-compatible adjacencies, or juxtabridities, which are proposed as having the capacity to create 'place' as a by-product of large scale intervention.