Static / Kinetic city (R. Mehrotra)

"The static city is built of more permanent materials - such as concrete, steel and brick - and is comprehended as a two-dimensional entity on conventional city maps and is monumental in its presence. Architecture is clearly the spectacle of the static city. And while the static city depends on architecture for its representation, it is no longer the single image by which the city is read. On the other hand, the kinetic city is not perceived through architecture, but through spaces, which hold associative values and support lives. Patterns of occupation determine its form and perception. It is an indigenous urbanism that has its particular 'local' logics. It is not necessarily only the city of the poor, as most images and discussions of the informal city might suggest; rather it is a temporal articulation and occupation of space which not only creates a richer sensibility of spatial occupation, but also suggests how spatial limits are expanded to include formally unimagined uses in dense urban conditions.

The informal or kinetic city carries local wisdom into the contemporary world without fear of the modern, while the static city aspired to erase the local and recodify it in a written formal order. The issue of housing (alums, shanty towns, etc.) most vividly demonstrates the rendering process of the kinetic city by the static city. Flow, instability and indeterminacy are basic to the kinetic city. [...] Thus the kinetic city is a fluid and dynamic city that is mobile and temporal (often as a strategy to defeat eviction) and leaves no ruins. It constantly recycles its resources, leveraging great effect and presence with very little means.

Mumbai (web.mit.edu )

Clearly, static and kinetic cities go beyond their obvious differences to establish a much richer relationship both spatially and metaphorically than their physical manifestations would suggest. Here affinity and rejection are simultaneously played out and are in a state of equilibrium maintained by a seemingly irresolvable tension. The informal economy of the city vividly illustrates the collapsed and intertwined existence of the static and kinetic cities. In fact, the kinetic city presents a compelling vision that potentially allows us to understand more clearly the blurred lines of contemporary urbanism in Latin America, Asia or Africa and the changing roles of people and spaces in urban society. The increasing concentrations of global flows in these contexts have exacerbated the inequalities and spatial divisions of social classes. In this context, an architecture or urbanism of quality in increasingly inequitable economic conditions requires that one looks deeper to find a wide range of places to mark and commemorate the cultures of those excluded from the spaces of global flows. These do not necessarily lie in the formal production of architecture, but often challenge it. Here the idea of a city is an elastic urban condition, not a grand vision, but a 'grand adjustment'."

Mehrotra, Rahul (2012 [2010]) "Foreword". In: Hernández, Felipe; Kellett, Peter; Allen, Lea K. Rethinking the Informal City. Critical Perspectives from Latin America. Oxford: Berghahn Books. pp xi-xii.