Loose Parts

Stub note: created at the Becoming Places ingest; requires fuller treatment as further loose-space sources are ingested.

Definition

Loose parts name the mobile, appropriable elements of urban space whose movement and re-placement make streets work as places of slippage — "food stalls, hawker trolleys, chairs, tables, washing, retail goods and vehicles" (Dovey & Polakit 2010, p. 168). In Dovey's Bangkok study the concept is one third of a triad: "The looseness of public space in Ban Panthom can be construed as a conjunction of loose forms (or loose parts), loose practices (behaviours, functions) and loose meanings. Looseness of form is primarily linked to the loose parts which move around this neighbourhood with a high level of flexibility… The looseness of function is closely linked to the loose parts, the manner in which the same space is used for a multiplicity of functions either at the same time or different times… Loose meanings are in turn linked to loose relations between forms and functions" (p. 167). Loose parts operate on a continuum "from the almost continuously moving hawker trolleys to stalls that have become almost permanent" — and their temporality is the concept's point: "In some cases such furniture and goods remain in public space permanently, where they may become extensions to the architecture which become fixed over time. In these ways, loose parts gradually become almost permanent, yet camouflaged among the mobile stalls and trolleys" (p. 175).

The Yogyakarta register gives the concept its material-accumulation form: "A range of stored construction materials – bamboo, roof tiles, bricks – are placed between overhanging roofs, against solid walls and in vacant corners of public space where they are 'banked' until resources are available for the next phase of upgrading or construction"; "the placement of loose parts is determined by an underlying logic: a lack of interior space and a need to spill both resources and activities into public space; a constant need for solar clothes drying; the need to accumulate construction resources over time" (Dovey & Raharjo, pp. 93, 94). Loose parts are thus the material form of practiced-place — and the monetized form is the sidewalk rent structure: "the income from this public sidewalk flows in six different directions – the adjacent proprietor, three restaurants, the local authority and its officers" (p. 176).

Key Thinkers

• Kim Dovey (with Kasama Polakit and Wiryono Raharjo) — the concept's urban theorists: the loose parts/practices/meanings triad; the trolley-to-building continuum ("Hawker trolleys become building renovations and renovations become demolitions," p. 182); the banked-materials economy of the kampung.
• Karen Franck & Quentin Stevens (not yet paged — see log) — the lineage: Loose Space: Diversity and Possibility in Urban Life (2006), the volume in which Chapter 11 first appeared as "Urban Slippage"; the concept's source anthology.
• Michel de Certeau — the tactical antecedent: the user's appropriation of the place others own; loose parts as tactics materialized.

Related Concepts

• practiced-place — the practice frame: loose parts are practiced place at the scale of the trolley, the mat, the parked car.
• smooth-and-striated-space — the spatial condition: looseness as smoothness; "The looseness of urban space can be construed as different kinds of juxtaposition between loose parts, loose practices and loose meanings" (p. 181).
• informal-urbanism — the economic base: loose parts as the infrastructure of the street economy (vending, repair, dining).
• everyday-architecture — the building-scale effect: the trolley that becomes architecture; the "renovation" that becomes demolition; furniture and building blurring.
• boundaries — the negotiated edge: the yellow-painted appropriation zones of the sois, the steel-frame parking markers, the potted plants that screen vendors.
• microevent-microenvironment — the temporal register: the diurnal/nocturnal transformation of Samsen Road as microenvironmental cycling.
• strategy-and-tactic — the power frame: the fine/bribe/fee slippage as the loose governance that keeps the loose order under control.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the concept's founding source: the triad definition (p. 167); the loose parts continuum and the trolley-becomes-building case (p. 175); the Yogyakarta banked materials (pp. 93–94); the sidewalk rent ecology (p. 176); the intersection competition of cars and breakfast stalls (pp. 173–174); the slippage catalogue (p. 182).

Open Questions

• Is there a design discipline of loose parts — provisioning mobility (power, water, storage) rather than fixtures? The supervised-injecting chapter's "ephemeral or mobile" facility proposal (p. 151) is the book's own sketch; does the wiki's productions and production-oriented-practices cluster describe the same logic at art scale?
• When does a loose part become a striation — the trolley that becomes a building is appropriation becoming property. Is the loose/permanent boundary the same line as legal/illegal, and who draws it (the fine/licence/bribe continuum suggests it is purchased, not decided)?
• Gender and age of loose-part users: children's play distributes widely "with a mix of genders… from a young age" while teenage girls are "much less visible" (p. 91); the female laundry-and-information networks along the river. Do loose parts have a demography, and who is excluded by the deepest troks?