Urban design as an instrument in restructuring of spatial organization disciplines

IV ABSTRACT Under the conditions where discourses of change and transformation guide the way, the term "restructuring" that gives this study its title, undoubtedly does not address to being specific merely to spatial organization. Behind it, takes place a comprehensive structuring that is nourished by global formations and is reflected upon scientific grounds as a "paradigm break". Within this structuring, it is possible to read the societal model and space shaped by Modernity since the Enlightenment; along the way from Fordism to Postfordism those formations that extend to globalization or those reflections the formations mentioned in relation with Postmodernity leave upon social/spatial reality. The conditions where the Second Enlightenment, which renders positivist science as invalid, makes the grounds of, not only natural, but also social sciences slippery, display the insufficiency of the existing structuring. The reflections of changing time-space comprehensions that index the styles of life to "speed" and "consumption" or those conditions where "place" becomes a commodity within global considerations, but where difference, multiplicity and plurality are emphasized simultaneously, can all be observed explicitly. As a consequence, Modern sciences and particularly the spatial sciences become weak and incapable. Such a reading involves the deciphering of existing conceptualizations and scrutinizes the sort of contingencies created on theoretical/practical grounds and the kind of searches set forth as a way out of the conditions of crisis. By this way, while trying to explain what exists, the way Modern planning/design has been instrumentalized becomes conspicuous sometimes in those projects that target the global as guided by relations of accumulation or in contests to become a culture "capital" or sometimes in such developments that foster inequality in the name of increasing spatial quality. The way the specific solutions of the society encloses space within unseen boundaries can also be conceived of. As for the ways of resolution, they will have to be either compensating or bring forth new conceptualizations within a completely asymmetric position.This asymmetric position has necessitated a tendency where the indicator of the new conceptualizations point to "communicativeness". Within such a framework, the science of space will have to abandon being a technical activity dictating in a top-bottom structuring, but be restructured to become a bottom-top activity that fits the social realities. Spatial organization should thus be discussed in terms of not urban marketing that is guided by relations of capital accumulation, but of communicativeness. While it produces knowledge of space with the new mission it undertakes, restructuring of spatial organization will have to take its first step from the transformation of public spaces to communicative spaces, which will then avail for the formation of a democratic society.